Job Dis-Satisfaction and Voting for the Populist Radical Right

How does job (dis-)satisfaction inform the political outlook of the workforce? Drawing on the ISSP’s work orientations modules, we show that the politicization of work-related worries has considerably transformed during the recent four decades. While during the late 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, work dissatisfaction has been a predictor of voting for political parties left of center, in the 2010s, the far right has become a major electoral beneficiary of work dissatisfaction across West European and North America. We develop and test potential explanations for this finding. Contrary to our expectations, we do not find evidence that increasing work dissatisfaction among subgroups has bolstered populist preferences. On the contrary, we find evidence that economic ideologies such as unionism and producerism mediate the politicization of work dissatisfaction. Looking to the political supply-side, we propose that left- and right-wing parties’ changing economic ideologies may have driven historical changes in the politicization of work. Next steps in the development of this article will include the examination of country- and institutional-regime specific trajectories as well as of the association between subjective and objective indicators of historically changing work conditions.