Abstract
AbstractA central challenge in understanding public opinion shifts is identifying whose opinions change. Political economists try to uncover this by exploring voters’ economic vulnerability, particularly the relationship between labor-market risk and redistribution preferences. Predominantly, however, such work imputes risk from occupational or sectoral characteristics. Due to within-occupational inequality in exposure to risk, considerable variation remains unexplored. I propose an individual-level, dynamic account of risk inferred from job tenure, contract type, and expectations of job security. These aspects, importantly, account for individual variation in risk and the possibility that one's experience of risk may change across time. The results indicate the usefulness of this approach to risk in understanding changes in social spending preferences.
Highlights
The past few decades have seen a remarkable transformation in labor markets across the advanced industrial societies: employment opportunities decreased in certain industries and occupations, and not in others
As the labor share declined across the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and domestic labor markets became more reliant on precarious jobs, citizens’ economic experiences and redistribution preferences have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention
2.3.3 Summary Based on these considerations, I propose a dynamic approach that integrates the objective and subjective facets of risk and maps the labor force into three groups, as shown in Figure 2: those without a job, those employed in a precarious job, and those employed in a secure job, each with a corresponding risk and employment opportunity
Summary
The past few decades have seen a remarkable transformation in labor markets across the advanced industrial societies: employment opportunities decreased in certain industries and occupations, and not in others. Significant changes in one’s economic standing, whether realized (e.g., job loss) or expected (e.g., a sharp increase in one’s likelihood of getting unemployed), are predicted to shape these preferences, well beyond what a voter’s income would suggest (Meltzer and Richard, 1981; Rehm, 2009; Margalit, 2019). This is found to be true for individuals working in industries or occupations exposed to the risk of automation, outsourcing, and offshoring, or necessitating more specific skill investments (Iversen and Soskice, 2001; Walter, 2017; Thewissen and Rueda, 2019). Citizens working in risky occupations or industries are expected to support social spending more than their less risk-exposed counterparts
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