Working Together or Drifting Apart? Segregated Workplaces, Polarizing Politics

• In Event: Polarization at Both the Elite and Voter Level

Abstract

The transition to the knowledge economy has given way to increasingly unequal and dualized labor markets. Recent scholarship in political science has examined how the heightened risk of job loss in certain occupations, industries, and regions is linked to growing political divisions between the `winners' and `losers' of occupational change. What remains strangely absent from ongoing debates are the simultaneous changes unfolding in workplaces, despite their longstanding role as a forum for cross-cutting political discussion. While the postwar economy brought together a multitude of occupations in the same space, the knowledge economy is instead characterized by the segregation of workers across both sectors and firms. We argue that increasing isolation at work has so far been overlooked but can help us explain contemporary political cleavages in the knowledge economy. Our analysis proceeds in two steps: First, we develop a novel indicator of occupational class segregation at the establishment level using administrative matched employer-employee data from Germany. We document pronounced patterns of increasing isolation at work for both the top and bottom of the occupational distribution since the early 1990s. In a second step, we exploit the possibility of linking this measure with individual-level panel survey data to analyze its consequences for political preferences and behavior over the past three decades.

Author

• Briitta van Staalduinen, University of Konstanz