Office Parties: Partisan Sorting in the United States Labor Market

• In Event: Labor, Identity, and Intergroup Relations

Abstract

Despite a growing literature on geographic sorting along political lines, there exists no large-scale estimate of the degree to which Americans are sorted by political partisanship when at work. This is despite the large and important role the workplace plays in cultivating cross-partisan contact. We address this gap using an novel dataset we create by merging voter registration data with over 16 million online employee profiles covering 14 million unique workers. We present three main findings. (1) Partisans are sorted by workplace. We estimate that the average Republican worker’s co-workers are 12% more Republican the average Democrats’ co-workers (and vice versa). Accounting for factors correlated with partisanship—geography, occupation, and industry—reduces this estimate to 4 percentage points, which is similar in magnitude to our estimates of workplace sorting by gender and race. (2) Since 2017, political sorting has increased among new joiners to firms. (3) Because Democrats comprise a greater share of the workforce, sorting means that Republicans experience a significantly larger share of out-partisan coworkers. We outline avenues for future research regarding the origins and consequences of workplace partisan sorting.

Authors

• Max Kagan, Columbia Business School

• William Reuben Hurst, The University of Maryland