Study: Political segregation in the US workplace
When people think of workplace segregation, they usually think of race or gender. Yet Americans are also sorted at work by something employers rarely measure: how they vote.
That matters because for many people, work is one of the last places they regularly spend time-and cooperate-with people on the other side of the political divide.
A new study co-authored by Justin Frake, assistant professor of strategy at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, provides the first large-scale measurement of political segregation in the U.S. workforce, and finds it rivals segregation by gender.
Frake and colleagues built a new dataset linking public voter registration records to the employment histories of tens of millions of workers.
It covers far more of the workforce, and more representatively, than the campaign-donation data most prior research has relied on. Few workers donate to campaigns, and those who do tend to be older, whiter and wealthier than the workforce as a whole.
Unlike race and gender, political affiliation is not a protected class under federal employment law, so this kind of sorting faces few of the legal guardrails that constrain other forms of workplace segregation.
According to the study published in Nature Human Behaviour, Americans are sorted by party at work to a degree that rivals gender segregation. The average Democrat's co-workers are 11.7 percentage points more Democratic than the average Republican's co-workers.
This isn't just a story about where people live or what industry they work in. Even comparing workers in the same city, industry and occupation, a Republican still has meaningfully more Republican co-workers than a Democrat does. Across these comparisons, political sorting is comparable in size to how much workers are sorted by gender.
The sorting is strongest among the people most engaged in politics and most able to choose where they work. Political donors are sorted about 27% more than nondonors, and segregation is highest among senior executives and highly skilled workers. That suggests political sorting is partly a choice people are making, not just a byproduct of where the jobs are.
Some workplaces are almost entirely one party. Co-workers in coal mining and gas pipelines are roughly two-thirds Republican, while in museums and environmental groups they are only about a quarter Republican. Drill operators and pilots sit at one end, social workers and historians at the other.
There is a striking asymmetry revealed in the research: Republicans encounter Democrats at work far more than the reverse. The typical Republican's workplace is about half Democratic, while the typical Democrat's is only about a third Republican.
That is partly because Democrats are a larger share of the workforce, and segregation magnifies the gap. It also means the chance to work alongside the other party is distributed unevenly: Republicans get more of it, Democrats less.
The gap has risen only modestly since 2012, so this looks like a fairly stable feature of the labor market rather than a sudden shift.
In a separate study, Frake and colleagues find where people work also shapes whether they vote. Linking employment and turnout records for 28 million Americans, the team finds workplaces have their own "civic cultures."
When co-workers vote at higher rates, a worker becomes more likely to vote, too-an effect larger than many door-to-door get-out-the-vote drives and strongest among people who don't usually vote. The effect runs both ways: In lower-turnout workplaces, workers become less likely to vote.
"For a lot of Americans, work is one of the few places left where they regularly cross paths with people who vote differently," Frake said. "What surprised us is how much even that has sorted by party.
"Taken together, the findings suggest the workplace is both one of the last places Americans meet the other party and a quiet force shaping whether they take part in democratic life at all."
