The Political Consequences of Outsider Labour Market Status in the United States: A Micro-level Study

This paper contributes to recent research that seeks to understand the political consequences of ‘outsider’ labour market status. There is an emerging consensus that labour market outsiders have systematically different policy preferences and display systematically different political behavior to securely employed ‘insiders’ in Europe. Yet the political consequences of outsider status in the United States are less clear. They may be expected to differ from those that have been documented in the European context, because 1) the US is characterized by low employment protection of insiders, and 2) there is evidence that Americans are more reluctant than Europeans to hold governments responsible for personal economic hardship. We therefore use the General Social Survey to examine how outsider labour market status is related to voting behavior and to social policy preferences in the United States. We find that the concept of ‘labour market outsider’ - as conventionally operationalized - holds little explanatory power in the American context. Disaggregating the outsider category, our results suggest that the political consequences of outsider labour market status may be contingent on individual beliefs about government responsibility.