Economic Sins, Political Indulgences: Personal Political Activity As Compensation for Stigmatized Economic Associations

Politics increasingly divides white-collar workplaces. Google workers protested the company’s ties to Israel; Congressional staffers conducted sit-ins to advocate for climate change; walkouts followed the Me Too and Black Lives Matter movements. Such protests speak to two converging trends in political and economic sociology. First, they reflect the rise of education-based political realignments, with affluent, college-educated workers moving left and working-class voters shifting right. Second, they demonstrate how public political debates have penetrated private economic life. Although sociologists and political scientists have long studied both trends individually, their intersection in the contemporary workplace poses novel questions regarding the relationship between individuals’ economic roles and their political beliefs. This paper investigates two of these questions. First, do employees engage in political behavior to compensate for their economic ties to stigmatized firms? Second, does engagement in these “political indulgences” vary between white-collar and blue-collar workers at the same firm? Drawing on longitudinal, individual-level panel data from the Database on Ideology in Politics, and Elections (DIME), this paper uses a difference-in-difference design to compare the political donations of employees following public scandals at their firm with employees in the same industry at non-stigmatized firms. It finds that employees are more likely to donate to political causes following the public stigmatization of their employer, and that the total amounts and the partisan skews of their donations likewise increase. Although both white-collar and blue-collar employees experience a change in donations following the stigmatization of their firm, white-collar employees’ donation behavior shifts more notably than that of their blue-collar counterparts. These results suggest that individuals, particularly affluent professionals, engage in “political indulgences” to manage conflicts between their economic and political selves – compensating for dishonorable economic associations with heightened political activity.