Abstract
Like many public service workers, politicians must manage the emotions of others as well as themselves in order to facilitate cooperation or goal accomplishment. Coined by Arlie Hochschild, this type of work is known as emotional labour. This article analyses a unique data set on the emotional labour and occupational wellbeing of over 500 elected politicians in the United Kingdom to understand how this important feature of public service plays out in political office. On one hand, all three facets of emotional labour (emotion work, personal efficacy, and false-face acting) are found to be prevalent among elected politicians, with self-reported levels of emotional labour differing among men and women. On the other hand, emotion work and personal efficacy appear to improve job satisfaction and occupational pride among politicians, but false-face acting increases symptoms of occupational burnout. These findings raise important questions about the nature of political institutions and the sustainability of political work.
Highlights
Like many public service workers, politicians must manage the emotions of others as well as themselves in order to facilitate cooperation or goal accomplishment
Engaging with a unique data set gathered from over 500 UK politicians, I find evidence that (1) emotional labour is a common feature of ‘working’ as an elected politician; (2) women holding democratic office are required to perform emotionally intensive work more regularly than men, but they feel more competent at conducting emotional labour; and (3) emotional labour can improve occupational wellbeing, but emotional labour can increase symptoms of burnout
Subject to more comparative work within the UK cultural context as well as other legislatures, the results of this study suggest that politics is similar to other high-intensity service-oriented professions in terms of both the type of labour it extracts from its ‘employees’ and the psychological toll it takes on their occupational wellbeing
Summary
Like many public service workers, politicians must manage the emotions of others as well as themselves in order to facilitate cooperation or goal accomplishment. Emotional labour has already been proven to affect women more than men in other service-oriented industries (Cottingham et al, 2015; Johnson and Spector, 2007), but political science is yet to take up the same topic of study in order to analyse the unobservable ways in which legislative bodies and political communities render political work more or less difficult for women In offering such an analysis in this article, I contribute to a growing body of feminist institutional research that seeks to expose the gendered consequences of masculine norms in organisational settings I find that emotion work and personal efficacy positively predict levels of job satisfaction and occupational pride, but false-face acting positively predicts symptoms of occupational burnout such as exhaustion, pessimism, and stress These are highly significant findings that raise important questions about the nature of political work as well as the sustainability of modern politics and the suitability of current institutional support mechanisms for elected politicians in the United Kingdom and beyond. Defined across different academic disciplines as verbal judo, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 23(3)
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