Job Precariousness and Political Orientations: The Case of Italy

Abstract

This paper explores the role played by job precariousness in political orientations, and examines the extent to which job precariousness could represent a new political division in Italian society. We have investigated the explanatory role of job precariousness for political orientations and analysed its interaction with the declining traditional cleavages (territory, class, religion). Based on a national sample of 15,000 workers, our results provide some evidence that job precariousness is a social variable exerting a significant impact on political orientations. Furthermore, we found that different conditions of job precariousness, such as temporary work and unemployment, affect political attitudes in different ways. Finally, our evidence suggests that the relationship between job precariousness and political orientations is significantly influenced by territory and class.

Keywords:

• Job Precariousness
• Political Orientations
• Political Cleavages

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Ipsos Italia and its Ceo Nando Pagnoncelli, who made available the ‘Polimetro’ database, on which the analysis is based. We also thank the two anonymous referees and Anna Bosco for their helpful comments.

Notes

 [1] As recently stressed (Davidsson & Naczyk 2009; Häusermann & Schwander 2009), in the literature there are different ways of thinking about the insider–outsider divide (by emphasising employment status, transferable skills and resources, access to benefits and protection, etc.). In particular, in recent years the ‘polarisation debate’ has been particularly fertile. Early works on the insider–outsider model distinguished only between employment and unemployment (Lindbeck & Snower 2001). Later, the increase in labour market flexibility led many authors to include temporary and involuntary part-time workers in the conceptualisation of outsiders (Rueda 2005). More recently, some authors have stressed the analytical necessity of distinguishing between different outsider groups (Häusermann & Schwander 2009).

 [2] In the 1960s and 1970s, political scientists called the centre–north regions of Italy the Red and White Zones because they were strongly characterised, respectively, by socialist or Catholic culture. Nowadays, these political connotations are much weakened; nevertheless, ideological anchorages are still more present in the north than in the south.

 [3] Among the unemployed we included people with cassa integrazione guadagni, i.e. workers benefiting from state subsidies for employees affected by temporary lay-offs or under a forced reduction of working hours, but have excluded from the analysis people in search of their first job, since their social and psychological status makes them very different from people who have lost their job.

 [4] The distributions of these variables in the sample are as follows. Territory: northwest 26.3 per cent, northeast 12.3 per cent, centre 18.1 per cent, south 43.3 per cent. Class: white-collar workers 68.4 per cent, blue-collar workers 31.6 per cent. Religious practice: every week 26.3 per cent, sometimes in the month 22.0 per cent, sometimes in the year 25.9 per cent, never 25.8 per cent. Gender: 50.2 per cent female. Age: mean 43. It must be noted that, while traditionally Italy was subdivided in four geo-political area, in our analysis we have put together northwest and northeast in the single category of ‘north’, following the tendency of the most recent studies (Cartocci 2011) in order to take account of the homogeneous electoral tendency in favour of the centre-right parties (Popolo delle libertà and Lega Nord) in the northern regions.

 [5] The UdC (Unione di Centro) was inserted among the centre-right parties.

 [6] We used linear regression for the two interval dependent variables (political disinterest and left–right self-placement) and logistic regression for the two dichotomous dependent variables (intention to abstain/vote and vote intention for centre-left/centre-right parties).

 [7] Means of the political attitudes: average values of political attitudes in the case of linear regression (political disinterest and left-right self-placement), and average predicted probabilities in the case of logistic regression (abstensionism and voting intention). We have produced these means using the ‘margins’ procedure in the Stata statistical package.

 [8] In fact, if we look carefully at the second two plots of Figure 1, we can also see a slight leftist tendency (although not a significant one) among temporary workers compared with regular workers.

 [9] Further analyses gave evidence that labour-market precariousness did not increase political radicalisation: outsiders were not more likely to place themselves on the extremes of the ideological spectrum.

[10] We also included gender and age as control variables.