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The Workplace as a Site of Political Preference Formation. How ‘Bridging Institutions’ Strengthen Democracy.

Objective

How does the changing organization of work affect political conflict in advanced democracies? While we know much about the impact of labor markets on political attitudes and behavior, the workplace as a site of preference formation is largely unexplored – even if this is where a majority of people spend most of their awake time, experience contact and collaboration within and across status groups, and exchange about society and politics. BridgeDem argues that social relations at work impact affective polarization, preferences for redistribution, and support for populism, and that changing workplaces have exerted a major influence on these outcomes. Linking political behavior and political economy literatures with sociology of work & organization, it explores this argument in three ways, studying how (1) changing management styles (2) increasing vertical segregation between status groups and (3) increasing horizontal segregation between social groups in companies have impacted the political outlook of the employed. These inquiries contribute to the encompassing endeavor of building a theory of ‘bridging institutions’ – institutions that set different groups within a society into meaningful social contact and by doing so foster democracy, the workplace serving as a crucial yet underexplored case. To do so, this project leverages an innovative and mixed methodological strategy, combining (a) theory development on the basis of in-depth qualitative interviews with (b) causal identification by matching administrative employer-employee datasets with individual-level panel surveys (SOEP-IAB; LISS-CBS) and (c) assessing long-term trajectories across countries and sectors using administrative and cross-sectional survey data. This comes with an outreach initiative to unions, HRM associations and the public, promoting an understanding of the workplace not merely as a site of economy but equally as a societal ‘bridging institution’ that generates feedback on democracy.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Net EU contribution
€ 214 344,72
Address
UNIVERSITATSRING 1
1010 Wien
Austria

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Region
Ostösterreich Wien Wien
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost
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