Electoral Behaviour and Relationship to Work, Employment and Trade Unions – CERTES

This project focuses on the electoral behaviour of citizens and on the influence of their relationship to work, employment and trade unions on this behaviour. It aims to bring together research in political science and economics on electoral behaviour and research in sociology and economics on work, employment and industrial relations. In particular, the aim is to contribute to a growing international literature which emphasises the role of work as a space where electoral behaviour is produced and which exposes the relationships between different dimensions of work (precariousness, autonomy at work, size of work collectives, etc.) and employee participation or voting choice. More broadly, the aim is to understand, in an original way, various social and political phenomena, such as growing abstention or the rise of so-called 'populist' movements, particularly among the working class.
The objective is twofold: to reconstruct, over time, the statistical relationships between employees' relationship to work and their voting behaviour and to show the relevance, in order to grasp these relationships, of an approach to work that is attentive to its multidimensional nature and to other social characteristics (gender, age, migratory experience, etc.). To do this, the project will be based on two national case studies: France and Belgium. Using innovative multivariate methods derived in particular from machine learning, it will analyse the electoral surveys available in these two countries (since 1958 in France and since 1984 in Belgium) and carry out, in the French case, a post-electoral survey entirely dedicated to work on the occasion of the 2024 European elections.