Help Wanted: The Politicization of Job Loss in High-Unemployment Contexts
Matthew B. Incantalupo[1]
Joint Degree Program in Politics and Social Policy
Princeton University
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Abstract: When Americans are laid off from work, who should be mainly responsible for helping them? I develop a new theory, Hardship-in-Context,which argues that citizens form political perceptions about their personal problems using relevant contextual information. Unemployed Americans perceive their hardship as individualized in low-unemployment contexts and as politicized in high-unemployment contexts. I examine several surveys over a period of time that includes both high and low unemployment and find support for this claim. When and where the unemployment rate is low, jobless Americans believe they are mainly responsible for helping themselves. When and where it is high, jobless Americans believe that government and employers are responsible for helping people who are laid off from work. Employed Americans do not display the same pattern of individualization in low-unemployment contexts and politicization in high unemployment contexts. I support these results using evidence from a recent longitudinal survey as well.Overall, I find strong evidence that the interaction of personal experiences and the broader context in which they occur helps to shape political attitudes.
When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the man, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals. (Mills 1959, 9)
In this paper, I advance and test the claim that individualsin high-unemployment contextspoliticize the personal hardship of unemployment and perceive it as a socially-centered political problem.[2]I argue that the effects of personalexperience with job loss on how Americans perceive unemployment vary as a function of the broader economic context, specifically labor market conditions.This implies that out-of-work citizens view unemployment as a personal problem in low-unemployment contexts and as a political problem in high-unemployment contexts. When unemployment becomes politicized, jobless Americans shift their foci of expectations away from themselves and look to government for solutions and assistance(Brody and Sniderman 1977). Itest this implication using a series of surveys merged with state-level unemployment data. To exploit as much variation in contextual factors as possible, I examinemultiplesamples that utilize the same survey instrument over an eight-year period that spans both good and bad economic times to understand how individuals’ perceptions of unemployment vary as a function of the broader context in which they experience this form of economic hardship. I also support these findings using a recent panel survey of Americans who lost their jobs in the Great Recession.
I find support for my theory; unemployed Americans in low-unemployment contexts are likely to report that unemployed workers are responsible for helping themselves while unemployed individuals in high-unemployment contexts believe that government and employers should help individuals who lose their jobs. Furthermore, unemployed individuals in high unemployment contexts are unlikely to believe that the unemployed should be mainly responsible for helping themselves. The politicization and deindividualization of unemployment as a function of local economic context is unique to jobless Americans; employed respondents do not exhibit this pattern of responses to the same extent as out-of-work respondents. This is strong evidence that unemployment is best understood in context, particularly with respect to how it can shape political beliefs and ultimately contribute to mobilization and political participation (Incantalupo 2012a).
Background
In general, Americans do not expect government to help them deal with their personal problems and hardships. “Citizens are likely to think the government has some responsibility to help only if the type of problem of most concern to them is manifestly beyond the capacity of any one person to deal with all by himself. Otherwise, they are overwhelmingly likely to insist that it is up to them to cope with the problem on their own” (Brody and Sniderman 1977, 340). This rugged individualism and the belief that individuals are personally responsible for their economic successes and failures shape Americans’ attitudes towards economic and social policy (Free and Cantril 1968; Huber and Form 1973; Kluegal and Smith 1986). Americans rely primarily on themselves to cope with the personal hardships that they face and expect government to take on socially-located problems that are perceived as not amenable to individual influence, such as monetary inflation or natural disasters (Sniderman and Brody 1977).
Building off of this personal-social dichotomy, we can consider a continuum that ranges from fully self-located to fully socially-located on which Americans place their personal concerns (Brody and Sniderman 1977). Socially-located concerns become politicized and affect political attitudes as well as influence participation and voting. Self-located concerns do not link up to political behavior, and may in fact inhibit participating in politics or paying attention to current events because they are distracting. For example, job loss and financial strain place significant psychological (Schlozman and Verba 1979), familial (Feather 1989; Schlozman and Verba 1979), and even health burdens (Warr 1987) on those who experience them, which make Americans less likely to think about or participate in politics. Writing about unemployment, Rosenstone concludes, “When a person experiences economic adversity his scarce resources are spend on holding body and soul together – surviving – not on remote concerns like politics” (1982, 26).
I begin with this personal-social continuum in developing a new theory of how Americans politicize their personal hardships. However, existing theories argue that citizens believe government has a responsibility to help if the type of problem that most concerns them is one that they cannot manage on their own (Brody and Sniderman 1977; Sniderman and Brody 1977). This implies that citizens locate problems along the personal-social continuum based on their content, which is problematic because it requires too much from citizens, most of whom spend little time thinking about politics and more time worrying about their problems. Americans do not possess a great deal of political information (DelliCarpini and Keeter 1996 and may lack the necessary schemas to connect what is troubling them to politics (Lodge and Hamill 1986). Citizens often punish incumbents for things politicians cannot control or influence so long as they can connect their problems to government through a “folk story” (Achen and Bartels 2002). They can also be happy with government despite poor performance based on recent good economic performance (Bartels 2008) or even more banal events like sports victories (Healy, Malhotra, and Mo 2010).
In contrast, I argue that individuals locate their personal problems along this continuum based on the broader context in which they experience these hardships. By incorporating contextual information into the process of addressing and coping with their personal problems, Americans determine how widespread these problems are, the extent to which they are amenable to individual influence, and the degree to which they should shift their foci of expectations away from themselves and towards government. In this way, two citizens who are experiencing the same hardship can reach two different conclusions about whether their problems should be addressed by individual or government action if they experience them in disparate social and economic contexts.
Considering the role of context in determining how Americans respond to personal hardship allows us to reconcile the fact that problems that seem very personal by their content sometimes lead to political action. Having or caring for someone with a serious illness would be characterized as an individually-centered problem at face value (Brody and Sniderman 1977; Sniderman and Brody 1977). However, state and local health departments receive over 1,000 requests to investigate suspected cancer clusters each year (Thun and Sinks 2004). Actual cancer clusters are very rare, and most suspected cancer clusters are simply unfortunate coincidences reported by cancer patients or their loved ones who believe that they have noticed an unusual pattern of cancer incidences (Trumbo 2000; Robinson 2002). But, in the propercontext, a hardship that usually would not be politicized, a cancer diagnosis, contributes to political action that in some cases can continue for years.[3]
The same can be said for numerous other hardships. A foreclosure sale on a home is a self-located concern, but when hundreds of homes in a single county are facing foreclosure, citizens will perceive their own foreclosure as part of a socially-located problem. Organizations like the Foreclosure Working Group, an offshoot of Occupy Greensboro, boast hundreds of members experiencing foreclosure who are now engaging in political action and protests against major banks. As of June 2012, Guilford County, which contains Greensboro, had the fourth-highest foreclosure rate in North Carolina, and borders the county with the second-highest rate in the state.[4]And just as we observe “Occupy Homes” groups springing up in response to high foreclosure rates, we observe “99ers” groups forming to advocate for extended unemployment benefits to jobless Americans who have exhausted their unemployment compensation after a maximum of 99 weeks.
The proliferation of jobless advocacy groups following the most recent economic recession indicates that unemployment can meaningfully affect political behavior, at least if unemployment is sufficiently high and widespread. This is in contrast to Schlozman and Verba (1979), which finds that the unemployed are largely disorganized, in part due to a lack of class consciousness in the United States, but does not consider how the effects of unemployment may vary depending on the social and economic contexts in which Americans experience it. Economic context seems to affect attitudinal measures as well. The belief that hard work pays off, an important pillar of American political culture, increases following periods of economic growth and falls during recessions (Pew Research Center 2012). More locally, mass layoffs positively associate with voter turnout at the county level (Healy 2009; Margalit 2011); In the Canadian case, neighborhood-level unemployment negatively associates with support for free trade (Cutler 2007). Thus, there exists ample evidence in the existing literature that Americans’ attitudes related to work and unemployment can be shaped by broader economic conditions.
I argue that personal experience with unemployment is perceived as a self-located problem that is best remedied through individual action in low-unemployment contexts. When relatively few Americans are unemployed, the hardship of unemployment is individualized and jobless Americans are less likely to believe that the government should be responsible for helping them.[5] When and where the economy is struggling and the unemployment rate is high, unemployed Americans are more likely to perceive unemployment as a social problem and believe that government is responsible for helping them deal with it.
I define individuals’ perceptions of unemployment as politicized to the extent that they believe that government bears responsibility for helping people who are unemployed. Citizens’ perceptions of unemployment are individualized to the extent that they believe that the unemployed are primarily responsible for helping themselves. I expect gainfully employed Americans to be more likely to perceive unemployment as individualized than as politicized in high and low-unemployment contexts. I expect unemployed Americans’ attitudes about unemployment to associate with unemployment context in the following manner: in low-unemployment contexts, unemployed Americans should individualize the hardships associated with being out of work. In high-unemployment contexts, unemployed Americans should politicize this experience and believe that government should step in and help.
Cross-Sectional Evidence
I make use of multiple editions of the Work Trends Poll, a survey of labor force participants administered by the John J. HeldrichCenter for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. The advantages of using this poll are its focus on members of the labor force and emphasis on public attitudes related to work, employers, the government, and economic issues. The polls feature attitudinal measures related to work not included on surveys more familiar to political scientists, such as the American National Election Studies. Unfortunately, relying upon these polls has its disadvantages as well. The polls do not contain many measures that typicallyaccompany attitudes about the government and the economy, such as a measure of political ideology. Still, I believe these are the best available data to test if perceptions of who is responsible for helping the unemployed are shaped through the interaction between personal experience with unemployment and the broader context in which unemployment takes place.
I use the following survey question from the Work Trends Poll series to measure the politicization of job loss: “When people are laid off from work, who should be mainly responsible for helping them? Is it government, employers, or workers themselves?” This is a very strong measure of the politicization of unemployment for several reasons. First, it asks a specific question about people who lose their jobs without adding additional information about deservingness or the circumstances under which they are laid off from work. This is a significant contrast from a measure such as asking respondents to agree or disagree with a statement like “It is the responsibility of government to take care of people who cannot take care of themselves,” which removes any ambiguity about individual efficacy and agency in solving a personal hardship. Additionally, it forces respondents to choose who they feel are mainly responsible for helping individuals who lose their jobs, as opposed to asking them the extent to which they believe government, employers, or workers themselves should help the unemployed as individual measures. Given Americans’ complicated beliefs about individualism and government’s role in the economy, it would not be surprising to find a large proportion of Americans believes that both government and individuals are responsible for dealing with the problem of unemployment simultaneously if asked about their roles separately. This question wording allows for a very straightforward test that unemployment becomes a politicized problem when experienced in a high-unemployment context. Unemployed individuals in high-unemployment contexts should be likely to believe that government is mainly responsible for helping the jobless.[6]
This question is repeated using the same wording in six cross-sectional Work Trends Polls, spanning from June 2003 through July 2011.[7] I present some basic information about the polls used in this analysis in Table 1.
[Table 1 here]
Table 1 serves as a useful summary of the sample sizes for each Work Trends Poll, as well as a summary of the economic context during each poll’s fielding. Perhaps the most glaring detail contained in Table 1 is the fact that the national unemployment rate increased by four points in just one year from May 2008 to May 2009. For each poll in this analysis, I also indicate the highest and lowest state unemployment rates. Particularly in the July 2010 poll, we observe considerable variation in unemployment at the state level.
As a simple first step, I plot respondents’ answers to my dependent variable, which asks who should be responsible for helping people who are laid off from work. I disaggregate the responses by employment status and poll to allow us to see if my expectations hold up under a very simple and descriptive analysis and present the results in Fig. 1. For each poll, I perform a simple chi-squared test to see if the pattern of responses is different between employed and unemployed respondents.
[Fig. 1 here]
This is good early evidence in favor of Hardship-in-Context. Over the course of the 6 polls, we observe unemployed respondents becoming more likely to say that government should be responsible for helping the unemployed and considerably less likely to say that the unemployed should help themselves. We observe a similar pattern but to a lesser extent among the employed. Even in July 2010, with the economy continuing to suffer under very high unemployment, employed respondents’ modal response is that people who are laid off from work should be responsible for helping themselves. In 4 of the 6 polls (June 2003, May 2008, May 2009, and July 2010), the chi-squared test is statistically significant at the 90% level or better, indicating that the pattern of responses we observe between employed and unemployed respondents is unexpected if employment status has no effect on this outcome and the responses we observe are due to chance alone. Now that we see that this pattern holds in the most basic sense, we can incorporate additional rigor into this analysis.