Politically Alienated Through Low-Wage Work? Evidence from Panel Data

Abstract

Does low-wage work lead to political alienation? Even though low-wage sectors have grown in the advanced industrialized world, empirical evidence so far is sparse. This paper uses household panel data to investigate the effect of low-wage work spells on political alienation. We argue that repeated low-wage work spells lead to preference divergence between a low-income and the median-income earner, leading to withdrawal from democratic politics among low-wage earners. Using Swiss household panel data and fixed-effects regressions, we show that the accumulation of low-wage work spells decreases systemic trust. In a second step, we demonstrate that an interaction of eroding systemic trust with low-wage work is associated with increased individual abstention probabilities. These results highlight the threat of a systematic under-representation of low-wage workers in the political sphere.