Conference Agenda

This paper examines the factors influencing trade union membership across European countries using data from the European Social Survey (ESS) Round 10. Earlier research has predominantly focused on single-country cases or has separately analyzed macro and micro variables in cross-national comparisons. In contrast, this study adopts a comprehensive approach by simultaneously investigating the impact of both macro/structural and micro/individual variables on union membership. Macro-level determinants include the political regime of the country and workplace and occupational characteristics. Specifically, this study examines government type (left-right), workplace size, and organizational type (public vs. private) as macro-level variables. At the micro level, individual characteristics such as age, gender, education, and employee qualifications are considered. By using logistic regression analysis, this study explores the determinants of both current and former union membership.

In the last fifteen years, the number of self-employed workers in Europe and Italy has increased at a remarkable pace. This trend has involved high- and low-skilled workers. Moreover, it has affected established and ‘emerging’ professions, often in production sectors developed or transformed due to digital innovation, as in the creative industries, where a range of professions is subjected to disruptive transformative pressures, characterised by individualisation, fragmentation and deregulation. Trade unions have pursued a number of different paths to respond to the emerging needs and struggles of these workers.

The focus of the paper is two-fold. The first objective is to discuss the processes of convergence and divergence in union membership rates for creative workers across European countries belonging to distinct models of capitalism during the past two decades. Through a case study involving creative professionals, the article aims to comprehensively examine the various traditional and emerging divisions within the labour market. The second objective is to shed light on the mechanisms that have produced the ‘mismatch’ between creative workers’ needs arising during the COVID-19 pandemic and institutional responses.

To address our research questions, we employed a convergent parallel mixed methods design. In the quantitative strand of the study, we analysed data from the European Social Survey (ESS). To describe the social, economic and institutional contexts in which labour markets operate and capture the trends and degree of changes in workers’ unionisation within the creative industries, we used data from three rounds of the ESS, with two distant points in time, one prior to the Great Recession (2002), one after (2018), and one in the midst of crisis (2012). Additionally, we used ESS data to estimate specified empirical models for each country group included in the analysis. Furthermore, an empirical study was carried out to investigate the Italian context from September to November 2020, through 30 interviews with key informants, comprising three union officials of SLC-CGIL, three managers of the leading cooperative social enterprise in the sector, and 24 workers (namely audio and video technicians).

The paper uncovers two hitherto unexplored phenomena. The first pertains to a significant segmentation within the domain of self-employment concerning job market security and working conditions. These divisions are not exclusively determined by the distinction between regulated and unregulated professions; while the latter group remains more vulnerable, these divisions seem to hinge on an individual worker’s position in the market, client base, and other factors. The second distinctive element is that, despite its imperfections and inefficiencies, the COVID-19 pandemic marks the first instance in Italy where economic safeguards have been extended to self-employed workers lacking adequate reserve coverage. Indeed, the argument of this paper, centred on the Italian case, is that the pandemic crisis has pushed these workers to establish relationships with trade unions to benefit from their ability to pressure State institutions and influence the drafting of emergency measures of employment protection and income support. As a push factor, the pandemic raised the possibility of reconnecting the missing threads between unions and disintermediated workers.

In recent decades, advanced capitalist democracies have witnessed the expansion of mass higher education. However, not all graduates find employment that matches their educational qualifications which leads to a rising share of graduates being mismatched (over-qualified). Yet, the political consequences of such a mismatch remain scarcely examined. In this article, I argue that mismatch creates frustration due to relative deprivation, which is evidenced by status inconsistency and economic disadvantages. This frustration manifests as political dissatisfaction because mismatched graduates externalize their frustration and blame the political environment. The empirical analysis examines a wide range of political indicators, focusing on 22 European countries. I rely on data from the European Social Survey 2016, 2018 and 2020, which I analyze using linear fixed effects models. The results demonstrate that educational mismatch significantly and robustly decreases satisfaction with the political system, political trust, external political efficacy and the likelihood to participate in elections among mismatched graduates. Furthermore, mismatched graduates are more in favor of redistribution, hold more negative attitudes towards immigration and are more likely to vote for the radical right, compared to their matched peers. Even in comparison to non-graduates, mismatched graduates exhibit lower satisfaction with democracy, reduced external political efficacy, trust, and decreased electoral participation. My findings provide insights into the complex interplay between educational systems, labor market dynamics, and political engagement. It illustrates important implications for our understanding of how educational experiences shape political orientations and behaviors within the context of post-industrial structural transformations.

Do employment opportunities in the global economy shape political behaviour in migrant-sending countries, and if so, in what way? Labour mobility is a topic of heated debate in Europe. Yet, in fact, the movement of labour across EU borders involves only a small fraction of the working-age population. An arguably more prevalent phenomenon is the growing availability of labour mobility options. This shift, primarily driven by the EU's freedom of movement and the rapidly growing demand for skilled workers, significantly expands employment opportunities for many across the EU. However, the availability of economic avenues outside one's country, especially as they get more attractive, provides citizens with an 'exit option' and, therefore, may have unintended consequences on certain facets of democratic citizenship. An increasingly popular view holds that having an exit option may insulate citizens from domestic politics, for example, by weakening national identity (Matthijs and Merler 2020), diminishing the legitimacy of elected institutions (Merkel and Zürn 2019), and reducing citizens' incentives to participate in politics (Paskalev 2021; Sellars 2019). Yet a contrasting view holds that having an exit option may enhance democratic citizenship by providing an 'exit threat' that empowers citizens, leverages their bargaining power vis-à-vis national authorities, and possibly boost political participation (Clark et al. 2017;Hirchman 1993; Karadja and Prawitz 2019). To date, these two contrasting views have remained largely theoretical. The empirical evidence that exit options – particularly employment opportunities overseas– affect individuals' political behaviour is anecdotal or based on single case studies and has yielded mixed findings. This suggests that the current research on exit options is conceptually and operationally fragmented and, therefore, cannot provide validity outside a specific context. Consequently, we still lack a sense of the role which intra-EU employment opportunities play in shaping political behaviour across European member states. The question remains: In what way and to what extent do individuals' political behaviours change in response to the intra-EU employment opportunities they face? This study addresses this question empirically from a comparative perspective. Specifically, it aims to make two contributions. First, it conceptualises and then utilises the Eurostat Labour Force Survey micro-data to create a reliable and comparable occupational mobility index, reflecting the intra-EU employment opportunities available to citizens across different years and a range of European countries. Second, it combines this index with cross-national public opinion data from the European Social Survey, which contains various measures of citizens' political behavior. This study concentrates on national attachment, political participation, democratic understanding, and views on redistribution policies. Intrinsically linked, those items underscore different degrees of communitarian versus liberal facets of democracy (De-Wilde 2023). Therefore, they stand as prime candidates to be influenced by intra-EU employment opportunities that provide citizens with different degrees of alternative affiliations and memberships. Preliminary results indicate that citizens with access to a wider array of employment opportunities in other EU countries exhibit weaker national identity and a lower level of political engagement in their home countries. This provides some support for the claim that labour mobility options do make 'bad citizens.'

There is a growing interest in workers in information and communication technology occupations - the tech-workers - as an increasingly influential social group. On one hand, tech-workers are viewed as a distinct social group, dominated by young, educated, and affluent individuals, who are also mostly male. On the other hand, tech-workers are in a unique position of power. They are responsible for the design and maintenance of informational infrastructures of contemporary societies, and they increasingly leverage their position of affluence to influence the social, political, and economic aspects of both the communities they live in and the society at large. This paper will use the ESS data to shed light on this last point, striving to understand how political attitudes and policy preferences of tech-workers relate to those of other occupations.

Existing literature interrogating political attitudes and policy preferences of tech-workers tends to focus on the US and on specific, usually elite, subgroups within this occupation. A handful of projects have engaged with assessment of political orientations of tech-workers, characterising them as overall liberal, socially-critical, and anti-establishment. Even fewer projects engaged with assessing more focused policy preferences demonstrating liberal views on social issues, globalism and redistribution, while opposing government regulation. To the best of our knowledge, no literature so far has systematically engaged with the link between the value orientations of tech-workers and their political or policy preferences.

Using the ESS data, this project offers a tri-fold contribution to the literature. First, it ventures beyond the borders of the US and the Silicon Valley. Second, it examines tech-workers as a broad occupation group, not limited to elite subgroups of the industry. Finally, it interrogates the links between value orientations, political attitudes, and policy preferences using a unified theory of basic human values.

In our prior work, using the ESS data, we demonstrated how value orientations of tech-workers differ from those of the general population and other occupational elites, while recognizing the diversity of values among tech-workers. Building on this work we will further leverage the ESS strengths to engage with potential repercussions of our findings about values. First, the representative and geographically diverse dataset of five recent waves of the ESS (2012-2020), allows for a large-N analysis of a broad group of tech-workers. Second, detailed and standardised occupation data, allows comparisons both between tech workers and other occupational elites, as well as exploring heterogeneity within the group. Finally, the rich policy preferences data and the core module on values within the ESS enables investigating the link between the two. We plan on employing a set of hierarchical models as well a mediation analysis to interrogate those connections.

This work will engage with possible implications of political mobilisation of tech-workers for causes they support. Further, it will address potential “spillover” of politics into technology design and discuss the link between diversity in tech occupations and its social impact.