Workplace Peer Effects in Turnout

• In Event: Social Networks and Political Sorting

Abstract

The workplace is an important arena for political conversations with a high potential for peer pressure since interactions are frequent and we care about our social standing at the workplace. Knowledge about these processes is however scarce. We argue that peer effects at the workplace are particularly important to understand since workplaces are becoming more sorted according to human capital, which implies that workplace peer effects can increase social inequalities in turnout. To explore this issue we use population-wide individual-level administrative data from Sweden that covers several general elections and includes firm identifiers so that turnout of colleagues can be measured. The data allows us to construct an instrumental variable for workplace turnout that is based on the turnout of peers of peers in previous elections. We show that this instrument passes relevance tests and argue that the exclusion restriction is likely to hold. We estimate peer effects under different definitions of peer groups at the workplace and leverage the richness of the data to estimate placebo peer effects. Our preliminary estimates suggest that workplace peer effects are politically important.

Authors

• Magnus Carlsson

• Henning Finseraas, Norwegian University of Science and Technology