Red Jobs, Blue Jobs

It has now passed into the realm of political cliché that there are red states and blue states. Like so many commonplaces there is a certain truth to the analysis. We expect Mississippi to vote differently than Minnesota, Indiana differently than Illinois, and Vermont differently than New Hampshire (the last a point made elegantly by Jason Kaufman in describing the divergence of political cultures). States have different political cultures, which are based on their histories, their values, and their economies.

However, even in the most garishly red of states, Democrats often get 2/5 of the vote, and the same is true in the most azure domains for Republicans. But what are we to make of these divides and these common tendencies? A potentially more powerful way of understanding politics is to recognize that even more than geography, occupations have political cultures. It is very often true that you vote as you work. While this has been recognized by political consultants as they target their mailings and by sociologists who examine what produces individual-level voting decisions by studying broad occupational categories, the red job/blue job divide has not captured the public which thinks in terms of land.

Research from the General Social Survey run by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago asked respondents their political preferences and their occupations. Based on surveys from 1996 to 2008, sociologists David Grusky and Kim Weeden constructed occupational categories which can be compared in light of political affiliations. The surveys focus on the basic division between liberals and conservatives (and self-professed moderates, who typically comprise half to two-thirds of any occupational group). While even these categories are somewhat broader than are desired for the examination of the local cultures of work, they serve adequately for making this point.

The results demonstrate vividly that there are substantial differences between jobs. For example, fewer than 5% of all bartenders consider themselves to be conservatives, while 27% admit to being liberals. This is a ratio of nearly 6:1. Conservatives might suggest that this reveals moral turpitude, while liberals suggest that this underlines the sympathy of barkeeps for the parade of human frailty that they encounter. In contrast, religious workers (perhaps not so very different from bartenders when one stops to think of it) are skewed 15% liberal, 46% conservative. Accountants are nearly 4:1 conservative, while professors are 4:1 liberal. Doctors and dentists trend conservative; lawyers and judges, liberal.

These data are curiosities, but what do they tell us? They help us understand the politics of geography: pulling back the covers on the red state puzzle. States and communities are not merely geography, but they are labor markets. If we learn that creative artists, authors, and journalists are overwhelming liberal, those regions in which the creative class resides (Hollywood, New York, even Las Vegas) will tend to elect Democrats. In turn, when we discover both farmers and (surprisingly) farm laborers are very conservative, agricultural regions become a strong base for the Republican party. On an even more minute level, those suburbs that attract police as residents tend to be conservative as a result, and communities of teachers tend to vote for more progressive candidates.

As a result, a central, defining feature of the politics of place is the politics of occupation. The red state/blue state chasm hides as much as it reveals. If we recognize that work is often linked to ideology, both because economic self-interest is different and because of the way that jobs (and our fellow workers) help us to read society and to understand human nature, we realize that this more fine-grained analysis helps us to color code our world.

As Andrew Gelman and his colleagues remind us in Red State, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State, occupations do matter. But we simply have to extend that analysis by emphasizing the places of work. The illusion of group boundaries is replaced with a more subtle recognition that occupations present a set of interests and world views. It is not the red clay of Georgia or mossy hillocks of Oregon that determine elections, but rather the job markets that rest on these soils.