AGAINST THE ESTABLISHMENT The Effect of Labor Market Disadvantage and Mainstream Party Convergence on Anti- Establishment Attitudes

Abstract

Workers in precarious employment may have no incentives to support the political system. Drawing on the insider-outsider debate, and the populism and party decline literatures, this thesis first investigates David Rueda’s claim that workers in precarious employment may have reasons to turn against the political establishment (the exclusion hypothesis). Second, it examines whether the effect of labor market outsiderness on anti-political establishment attitudes is moderated by the ideological distance between the two largest left and right parties with regard to economic and cultural issues. As such, this thesis brings together theories of populism and anti-partyism, labor market dualization and party competition under the overarching insider-outsider divide framework. In addition, this thesis pays considerable attention to concept operationalization. The dependent variable, anti-establishment attitudes, is treated as a latent predisposition, and computed with factor analysis. The independent variable is operationalized as both current employment status and occupational unemployment risk, acknowledging the recent debate on outsiderness operationalization. I test the hypotheses with survey data from ten European advanced democracies in 2014 and find that labor market outsiders, identified by higher exposure to unemployment risk, are more likely to endorse anti-establishment attitudes. By contrast, labor market outsiderness defined as temporary employment has no effect on the outcome of interest. Finally, I find qualified support for the moderating effect of party distance on hypothesis 1: party convergence on the cultural dimension is associated with a stronger effect of occupational unemployment risk on antiestablishment attitudes, while party convergence on the economic dimension is statistically insignificant.