Disentangling the Class-Sector Nexus: the Effect of Class and Employment Sector on Attitudes Towards Democracy and the Economy

While the relationship between occupational class and partisanship or economic preferences has been studied extensively in recent years, the role of employment sector - both on its own and in combination with occupational class - has not received as much attention. This paper builds on the growth model and social blocs perspective (Baccaro and Pontusson 2016 and 2019) and aims to study the joint impact of occupational class and sector of employment on political and economic attitudes in Switzerland, using individual survey data from the Swiss Household Panel. Indeed, economic sectors have different trajectories in terms of value-added and employment growth and exhibit varying degrees of integration into world markets and exposure to international competition. Furthermore, they often have different policy needs and demands, be it in terms of monetary or trade policy. For the most part, it can reasonably be expected that these features don't go unnoticed to workers, and an important question thus becomes that of the degree to which workers align some of their priorities and preferences with those of their employer, potentially overriding the logic of their class affiliation. In Baccaro and Pontusson's (2019) perspective, it is assumed that growth-driving economic sectors already benefit from a high degree of responsiveness on the part of mainstream political parties, as their main representatives tend to be at the core of the dominant social bloc. They further hypothesize that skilled workers from these sectors will tend to have political demands similar to those on their employer. Such a phenomenon should of course be apparent in terms of the workers' economic priorities and preferences, but should also result in them displaying a comparatively high degree of satisfaction with democracy and feeling of political influence, by virtue of being included in the dominant social bloc. On the other hand, groups such as routine workers and managers may be expected to hold priorities and preferences less dependent on their employment sector, owing in part to their skills being less sector-specific. By making use of sector-specific covariates in a multilevel framework, the aim of this paper is thus to investigate empirically the extent to which class conditions the association between employment sector and attitudes towards democracy (in particular satisfaction with democracy and feeling of political influence) and the economy (preferences for taxes on high income and social spending).