Types of labor market policy and the electoral behavior of insecure workers

Recent research finds a significant difference in voting behavior of workers with secure employment and those without. What is less understood are the conditions in which the divergent political choices of these two groups overlap. Focusing on two types of labor market policies—unemployment insurance and active labor market programs, this paper examines how more generous government spending on different types of welfare programs shapes the electoral behavior of individuals with adverse labor market experience. By using multilevel analysis of individual surveys from 18 European countries (1999–2015), I find that unemployed and temporary workers are more likely to vote against traditional left-wing parties and to withdraw from voting at all. The greater spending on unemployment insurance, however, alters the outcome by realigning insecure workers with old left parties such as social democratic and center-left socialist parties. By contrast, expenditure on active labor market programs has a weak conditional impact in general. The important implication of this study is that while government policy does moderate the effect of adverse labor market experience, types of social policy matters in understanding policy feedback effects. I further discuss this point in relation to the different implications of income support and activation programs for risk mitigation.