Regional Occupational Upgrading and Voting Behaviour in Germany

The increasing geographical polarization in voting behavior has renewed interest for the structural transformations in Western economies and their role in deepening spatial inequality. While there is much research on the success of right-wing parties in “left behind” regions, analyses of how regional economic conditions affect electoral support for other party families remain rare. Additionally, the existing literature predominantly relies on aggregate economic indicators such as GDP per capita change, which mask more nuanced transformations of regions. Our article thus asks to what extent changes in the regional occupational structure are associated with party support, focusing on Germany. Our study uses a 2% a random sample of workers registered in the social security system to create a novel indicator capturing long-term change in the quality of the regional employment structure at a fine-grained spatial level of 330 regions. It then combines this indicator with aggregated electoral data from the German federal election in 2017 and tests different hypotheses with geocoded individual-level voting data from the German Socio-Economic Panel. Our results demonstrate that in line with our expectations, long-term regional occupational upgrading is positively associated with vote choices for the Greens and conservative Union parties, while negatively associated with votes for the social democratic SPD. Critically, these findings remain consistent across at both aggregated regional and individual levels, after controlling for various regional and individual characteristics. This confirms that regional occupational change influences voting behavior beyond mere compositional effects. For instance, individuals in regions experiencing above-average employment structure upgrading (approximately 10 percentage points between 1993 and 2017) have a 7 percentage point higher probability of voting for the Union compared to those in regions with more average upgrading rates. Furthermore, contrary to our expectations, change in the regional occupational structure appears unrelated to voting for the radical right-wing AfD. This challenges arguments that economically disadvantaged regions tend to support radical right-wing parties. Instead, our findings suggest that people in regions experiencing declining employment opportunities are more likely to turn to established center-left parties for support. In sum, our paper advances the understanding of the socioeconomic foundations of geographic polarization in voting by highlighting how (un)favourable labor market development affects party support beyond populist parties.