Working Together or Drifting Apart? Political Preference Formation in Segregated Workplaces

The transition to a knowledge-based economy has given rise to increasingly unequal and dualized labor markets. Recent scholarship in political science reveals how this divergence in the risk of economic and social status loss is linked to a widening political divide between the 'winners' and 'losers' of occupational change. We draw attention to simultaneous changes unfolding in workplaces that we propose matter for how people experience and react to growing labor market inequalities. Using administrative matched employer-employee data from Germany, we first show that low and high occupational class workers have become more segregated across workplaces since the early 1990s. Then, leveraging a new link between the administrative data and individual-level survey data, we examine if and how this rise in workplace homogeneity contributes to the winner-loser divide that structures contemporary politics. Our findings show that declining exposure to other occupational classes, particularly the middle, is associated with reduced political participation and waning support for mainstream right parties. While we observe this at the bottom and top of the occupational hierarchy, we show that disengagement among lower class workers relates to dissatisfaction and pessimism about their status in society and prospects for its improvement in the future, whereas among higher class workers it more likely stems from an ambivalence about the need to participate in politics, given that the system largely works in their favor. We conclude by underlining the implications of our findings for future research on the forces shaping electoral divides in contemporary knowledge economies.