Politics at Work: How Companies Turn Their Workers Into Lobbyists by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez

Author:Alexander Hertel-Fernandez [Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Government & Business, political science, Political Process, Campaigns & Elections, History & Theory, Labor & Industrial Relations, Political Advocacy, Social Science, sociology, Social Theory
ISBN: 9780190629892
Google: dj9FDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-11-15T00:30:46.620549+00:00

Employer Mobilization and Worker Political Participation

In addition to showing how employer messages may change workers’ political attitudes and knowledge, the analysis of the CCES poll offers an opportunity to look at the effect of employer messages on political action. The CCES poll asked respondents whether they had participated in five civic activities from 2015 to 2016: voting in the 2016 election, attending a political meeting, putting up a political sign or wearing a button, making donations to political causes, and volunteering for campaigns or candidates. In all, 70 percent of workers reported performing at least one of these civic acts, and the average number of acts was one. If employer messages were indeed spurring workers to greater political action, then we ought to see that workers who had received employer contact would have reported more political acts compared to those workers who had not received employer contacts, net of other individual characteristics. Since the CCES asked about political contact from the parties or political campaigns as well as labor unions, we can also compare the effects of employer messages against those types of recruitment in a head-to-head matchup.

Table 6.2 summarizes the effects of each of these kinds of contact on the 0–5 index of civic participation using an OLS regression (full results in the appendix). The first column shows the effect of each of these three types of contact—employer, union, or political party—without taking into account any of the characteristics of the individuals themselves. All three types of contact are related to higher participation, but especially party and campaign outreach.

Table 6.2. Comparing the Effects of Employer, Union, and Party Mobilization on Participation, 2015–2016

Type of Contact Change in Civic Participation Index (0–5), No Controls Change in Civic Participation Index (0–5), Individual Controls Change in Civic Participation Index (0–5), Individual and Geographic Controls

Employer mobilization + 0.15 acts + 0.22 acts + 0.24 acts

Union mobilization + 0.52 acts + 0.38 acts + 0.31 acts

Party mobilization + 0.70 acts + 0.37 acts + 0.36 acts

Source: Data from 2016 CCES survey. Sample size is 823 for model with no controls; 720 for model with individual controls; 720 for model with individual and geographic controls. Individual controls include education, race, ethnicity, political interest, strength of partisanship, union membership, church attendance, income, age, age squared, gender, ideology, and voted in 2012 indicator. Geographic controls include district competitiveness (absolute value of Cook Partisan Voting Index) and state fixed effects.

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