The political behaviour of labour market insiders and outsiders: Taking mobility seriously

There is an emerging debate on differences in the political behaviour of labour market insiders (permanent workers) and outsiders (the unemployed and non-standard workers). Effects have been theorised for various dependent variables, including party identification and voting, policy preferences as well as political alienation. Although theoretically lacking prospects of upward mobility are a defining feature of ‘outsiderness’, empirical analyses so far have been constrained to snapshot approaches relying on individuals’ employment status or occupation at specific points in time. Drawing on the psychological literature on job and employment insecurity, I argue that the effect of current labour market position is moderated by subjective mobility expectations. In a nutshell, anticipated upward mobility makes outsiders discount their current situation, which in turn makes them indistinguishable from insiders in their political behaviour. Expected persistence or deterioration, however, lead to feelings of relative deprivation and political alienation. The argument is corroborated by an analysis of comparative survey data.

The paper makes two contributions to the debate on employment risks and political behaviour. First, the moderating effect of mobility expectations explains why so far no relationship of insider-outsider status and political alienation could be detected despite strong theoretical expectations. Hence, analyses ignoring mobility prospects as a source of heterogeneity among outsiders suffer from severe omitted variable bias. Second, the paper shows that subjectively anticipated mobility is a valuable indicator, which is suitable to at least partly compensate for the lack of panel data combining information on actual employment trajectories and political behaviour.