Losing one’s job is undoubtedly one of the most traumatic things that can happen in our life, but what does economic hardship do to our political preferences?  It’s a question new research has attempted to answer by examining data from over 7,000 people across the Netherlands between 2007 and 2016.

The study examined the question of whether political allegiance is largely hard baked in us as youngsters or whether it’s malleable and affected by life circumstances during adulthood.

When the data was analyzed, it revealed that our political ideology tends to be pretty resilient, and there was a strong degree of stability over time, even when people were exposed to significant events such as losing their job.  That is not to say that redundancies did not have any impact at all however, as people did indeed appear to review their ideology in the immediate aftermath of losing their job.

A shift to the left

Whereas the dominant political narrative of our age has suggested that support for the far right has blossomed in communities that have fallen on hard times, the data suggests that those who lose their job are more likely to veer left with their political ideology.

While lurches to the right were observed, the authors contend that this was driven more by other factors than it was directly linked with the redundancy.  Indeed, the authors cite previous work that finds that the rise of right-wing populism has been largely due to the fears of economic hardship rather than direct experience of economic hardship.

It should be said that these changes were relatively small, and they do appear to dissipate over time, but what is perhaps most interesting from the data is the variance in how people react to job losses.  While most people saw little change in their ideology after redundancies, for certain minorities it triggered a significant shift.

Significant shifts were most likely to occur when the redundancy was a surprise to the individual, or when they have minimal resources to buffer the impact of the loss of income.  Similarly, if the individual was cynical about their economic prospects, they were also more likely to lurch to the extremes.

As we seek to gain a better understanding of the forces that underpin the rise of populists on both the left and right of the political spectrum, work such as this provides an added insight.