The Politics of Grievances: Experiences of Job Quality and Radical Right Vote

A rich literature shows that transformations in the world work have significant political spillovers. The winners and losers of transformations such as technological change and globalisation have diverging political opinions and party preferences including support for radical right parties. These differences in political support and behaviour have been explained by dissimilarities in labour market prospects and social recognition. Yet, the role of experiences at the workplace in shaping voting behaviour has received comparatively less attention than other aspects of work. In particular, its link to radical right support remains understudied. We close this gap by connecting findings from two hitherto distinct literatures on multi-dimensional job quality and radical right voting. We posit that a lack of representation and voice at the workplace, perceptions of unfair renumeration, and feelings of a lack of recognition at work – which correspond to key dimensions job quality – may spillover into political beliefs of having no voice in politics, economic unfairness, and a lack of social recognition which have been shown to drive support for radical right parties in an era of resentment. We test these propositions in a regression setting using a large scale original cross-national survey fielded in 8 European countries between May and July 2024. The advantage of this dataset is that it contains questions measuring respondents’ workplace experience including their jobs’ quality. To preface our findings, we find that a lack of representation and voice robustly predicts voting for radical right parties. By contrast, perceptions of unfair renumeration and feelings of a lack of recognition at work are not significant predictors when included in the full model. In a rapidly changing world of work, these findings suggest that the workplace is relevant to understand radical right support that is underpinned by populist beliefs. However, they also suggest that the workplace is less relevant to understand radical right support driven by beliefs about economic unfairness and a lack of social recognition.