The Making of Populism at the Workplace: Enterprise Organizations as a Site of Political Preference Formation

Populist radical right wing (PRR) politics feeds on politicized discontent. While existing debates contrast economic with cultural discontents (Mudde/Rovia Kaltwasser 2018: 1673ff; Norris/Inglehart 2019: 44) and yet with such relating to social status (Gidron/Hall 2017), there are few contributions tracing more concretely where, in which domains of social interaction, these discontents are being produced. As a part of the PhD project “Populism and the Welfare State”, between 2018-2020, 150 biographical interviews with Austrian and German citizens have been conducted, more than half of these with manual workers (a core constituency of PRR parties), with the aim of tracing where discontents emerge and how they are being politicized. A focus has been placed on citizens’ experiences of the labor market, their employment trajectories and interactions with welfare state institutions and policies. A core finding is that many politically dissatisfied interviewees’ core experiences of discontent are set at the workplace, and namely, in management-employee relations. In some cases, this is related to labor law infringements or precarious employment situations. In some others, it is intertwined with negative experiences with state institutions (employment office, public pension insurance agency) and public policy provisions (e.g. pension policy). The consistent core experience, however, is that of “being treated unfairly” or of “not receiving recognition” by one’s employer. This counts both for private sector companies and for public sector organizations. The hypothesis that negatively experienced management-employee relations are associated with a right-wing populist vote has subsequently been tested on representative cross-sectional survey data from the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) using logistical regression models. Preliminary findings suggest a significant correlation of “employer grievances” with right-wing populism across European democracies. Interestingly, this effect is virtually unrelated to economic measures of deprivation. I interpret these findings in the way that workplaces carry important socially “integrative” functions and act as "bridging institutions" at the societal meso-level: enterprise organizations have the power to integrate individuals into collective courses of action and shared narratives, so conveying a sense of participation in the current model of the political economy. Dependently employed citizens who feel socially integrated via the workplace into a "just" model of social organization may, ceteris paribus, form more moderate political attitudes. Where workplaces, however, fail to unfold this "bridging" function and rather alienate, convey a sense of injustice and of exclusion from collective, societal courses of action, individuals retain a basic sense of social injustice and of exclusion from the current model of the political economy. This resonates with the messages of radical and populist political actors. This argument may contribute to a sociological understanding of "modernization losing" in advanced capitalist democracies.