The Scar Effects of Unemployment on Electoral Participation: Withdrawal and Mobilization across European Societies

Abstract

Does unemployment increase or decrease electoral participation? A considerable body of work has examined this classic question, focusing on individual and contextual unemployment. However, this literature has scarcely examined the role of past experiences of unemployment, and not yet addressed their interaction with contextual unemployment. In this article, we extend the framework of unemployment scarring to study electoral behaviour. First, we posit that unemployment scars decrease electoral participation. Second, we formulate competing hypotheses on the macro–micro interactions between unemployment rates and scarring at the country, NUTS1 and 2 levels. We test these hypotheses relying on Rounds 4–8 (2008–2016) of the European Social Survey, for 26 countries. Results from logistic regressions with country and year fixed effects indicate that citizens with long unemployment scars are 9% less likely to vote than the non-scarred. We further find that higher unemployment rates at the sub-national levels slightly increase turnout, while there is no significant effect at the country level. For the sub-national levels, we find that lower unemployment rates exacerbate the individual scarring effect on turnout up to 13%. These findings remark that the framework of the scar effects of unemployment further illuminates the relationship between social stratification and political behaviour.

Doubly disadvantaged: Unemployment, young age, and electoral participation in the United Kingdom

“…This result is robust across statistical approaches including contextual Fixed Effects and socio‐demographic controls, except for the Fixed Effects with Individual Slopes, and Event Study. This novel finding on the impact of unemployment in the British context aligns with previous panel data analyses in Germany (Emmenegger et al., 2017) and Sweden (Österman & Brännlund, 2023; Österman & Lindgren, 2021), and with cross‐sectional data for 26 European countries (Azzollini, 2021). The pattern that cumulative spells do not matter beyond the second supports the psychological mechanism of within‐person habituation (Rosenstone, 1982), suggesting the first experience disrupts the most (Laurence, 2015).…”

“…g ., Italy and Spain) present profound differences between young and prime age workers (Barbieri et al., 2019). There, higher youth unemployment may either mitigate or exacerbate the focal relationship (Azzollini, 2021; Österman & Lindgren, 2021), with the extent of moderation to be assessed by future research. Relatedly, future research may further explore how the mechanisms linking unemployment to turnout are affected by the life‐cycle, potentially with qualitative methods.…”

“…In recent years, this research programme has focused on socio-political outcomes: past unemployment experiences depress social trust (Azzollini, 2023;Laurence, 2015;Mewes et al, 2021) and participation (Eckhard, 2020;Pohlan, 2019), shift those who lost their jobs towards the left (Wiertz & Rodon, 2021), undermine political trust (Giustozzi & Gangl, 2021), and depress political engagement and participation (Azzollini, 2021;Emmenegger et al, 2017). Yet, the works by Emmenegger et al (2017) on Germany and by Österman and Brännlund (2023) on Sweden are, to the best of our knowledge, the only to study the joint impact of job loss and age on political engagement relying on panel datasets.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, only three studies have examined the impact of unemployment scars on electoral participation: Emmenegger et al. (2017), who originally extended the framework of unemployment scarring to political engagement; Azzollini (2021), who examined the joint impact of unemployment scars and contextual unemployment on electoral participation; and Österman and Brännlund (2023), who focused on the role of the life‐cycle and workplace socialisation in Sweden. Emmenegger et al.…”

“…To the best of our knowledge, only three studies have examined the impact of unemployment scars on electoral participation: Emmenegger et al (2017), who originally extended the framework of unemployment scarring to political engagement; Azzollini (2021), who examined the joint impact of unemployment scars and contextual unemployment on electoral participation; and Österman and Brännlund (2023), who focused on the role of the life-cycle and workplace socialisation in Sweden. Emmenegger et al (2017) highlight that the timing of unemployment during the life-course matters: relying on panel data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, Emmenegger et al (2017) found how experiencing unemployment during youth has strong detrimental effects on political interest and electoral participation, due to the 'impressionable years' phase in which political behaviour is formed and crystallises in the long-run (Alwin & Krosnick, 1991;Neundorf & Niemi, 2014;Plutzer, 2002).…”