Welfare Value Orientations and Party Attachments after Job Loss

Taking a look at the literature on individual welfare state preferences we learn that compared to employees the unemployed are generally more in favor of active and passive labor market polices. Furthermore, they show greater support for social benefits and redistributive policies in general (Emmenegger et al. 2015). And finally, they lean more towards left parties and welfare state values like equality (Marx and Picot 2013). But what about job loss? Do all these political beliefs change? Is there a causal effect of job loss on political attitudes and predispositions, as self-interest based arguments assume? Two recent panel studies suggest that this is indeed the case when specific policy preferences are in question (Margalit 2013; Naumann et al. 2016). However, when value orientations or party attachments are in question, there are good reasons to doubt their susceptibility to job loss: above all, their often found relative stability throughout life. Using panel data (2005-2013) from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) I will apply fixed effects models to answer the question if and how basic political predispositions (party attachments, value orientations) change in response to job loss. Of course, there are two obvious alternatives: no change at all as compared to a uniform swing towards left parties and values. But using respondents prior political predispositions as moderator we might think of two further hypotheses: 1) changes in predispositions do only (or mainly) occur for people from the right side of the political spectrum, while left people simply keep their previous leftist predispositions. 2) The whole process is (mainly) driven by people without (strong) prior predispositions. That is, it is actually predispositions’ formation, not predispositions’ change, we are talking about. The results of this research have on the one hand consequences for the interpretation of attitude change after job loss: should we expect this to be a long-run effect that might spread to more political beliefs? Or is it likely that sooner or later attitudes change back so they are again consistent with unchanged political predispositions? But on the other hand the answers to these questions might also influence how pessimistic we think about the future of our democratic welfare states. We might fear that job loss produces more and more dissatisfied citizens, whose demands can’t be met. But if predispositions do not change, the experience of economic hardship might be negligible in the long-run for citizens demands. References Emmenegger, Patrick, Paul Marx, and Dominik Schraff. 2015. “Labour market disadvantage, political orientations and voting: how adverse labour market experiences translate into electoral behaviour.” Socio-Economic Review 13 (2): 189–213. Margalit, Yotam. 2013. “Explaining Social Policy Preferences: Evidence from the Great Recession.” American Political Science Review 107 (1): 80–103. Marx, Paul and Georg Picot. 2013. “The party preferences of atypical workers in Germany.” Journal of European Social Policy 23 (2): 164–178. Naumann, Elias, Christopher Buss, and Johannes Bähr. 2016. “How Unemployment Experience Affects Support for the Welfare State: A Real Panel Approach.” European Sociological Review 32 (1): 81–92.