Bringing Politics Back to Work

An extensive literature in political economy shows that since the 1980s, large-scale processes such as globalisation, automatisation and sectoral change have impacted labour markets, occupational class structure, employment contracts and social policies, what in return has reshaped political conflict in advanced democracies (Kriesi et al. 2008; Oesch 2006; 2008; Emmenegger et al. 2012; Kitschelt/Rehm 2014; Kurer/Palier 2019). This literature has left surprisingly untouched, however, the black box of what happens at work, ie inside enterprises or public organisations. Work organisation, management practices, job quality, and wellbeing at work are in turn subject to a vast literature in sociology, psychology, and economics (Karasek 1979; Kalleberg 2011; Schütte et al. 2014; Holm/Lorenz 2015; Ó Riain/Healy 2023; Palier et al. 2023), which, however, rarely establishes connections with outcomes at the political level. This missing link is surprising, as the workplace is where a majority of people spend much of their awake time, experience intergroup contact and collaboration, authority and conflict about entitlements, and take home a sense of social status and recognition, of (in)efficacy, (in)security and (un)fairness. This informs political outlooks, including on major phenomena of our time: preferences for redistribution and welfare policies, demands for protection, populism, or affective polarisation (Gidron/Hall 2016; Mutz 2018; Antonucci et al. 2024; Kim/Hall 2023; Kiess et al. 2023; Wagner 2023). 'Bringing politics back to work', we aim to shed light on these mechanisms and set an agenda for political science to study what happens at the heart of the economy: at work.

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1: How does the organization of work inform individual political preferences?
2: How does job quality, wellbeing or contact/ conflict at work shape political outlooks?
3: How does this relationship vary by groups and context (countries, sectors, occupations, gender, age)?
4: How do political actors such as parties or unions address and politicize contemporary experiences at work?
5: How do welfare states and social policies influence these dynamics?

1: How experiences of work inform voting, populism/ radicalism, group conflict, and/or social policy preferences.
2: How this link varies across occupations, sectors, countries, gender, age/ cohorts, and over time.
3: How political discourses and programs resonate with work-related problems in diverse ways.
4: How social policies intervene into, moderate, or mediate these dynamics.