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The Politics of Part-Time Work: Gender, Employment Status, and Preferences for Redistribution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2020

David S. Pedulla  and
Michael J. Donnelly
David S. Pedulla
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Michael J. Donnelly
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Abstract

The social and economic forces that shape attitudes toward the welfare state are of central concern to social scientists. Scholarship in this area has paid limited attention to how working part-time, the employment status of nearly 20% of the U.S. workforce, affects redistribution preferences. In this article, we theoretically develop and empirically test an argument about the ways that part-time work, and its relationship to gender, shape redistribution preferences. We articulate two gender-differentiated pathways—one material and one about threats to social status—through which part-time work and gender may jointly shape individuals’ preferences for redistribution. We test our argument using cross-sectional and panel data from the General Social Survey in the United States. We find that the positive relationship between part-time employment, compared to full-time employment, and redistribution preferences is stronger for men than for women. Indeed, we do not detect a relationship between part-time work and redistribution preferences among women. Our results provide support for a gendered relationship between part-time employment and redistribution preferences and demonstrate that both material and status-based mechanisms shape this association.

Keywords

part-time employmentgenderworkredistributionpreferences
Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 321 - 358
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

Funding for this study was provided by the Department of Sociology at Stanford University. The authors contributed equally to this work, and their names are listed in reverse alphabetical order. The authors thank Charlotte Cavaille, Zoe Lefkofridi, Alex Murphy, Jacob Avery, and Mike Bader for constructive comments and feedback. They also thank Anna Boch for research assistance. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the University of Toronto Political Behaviour Workshop and the Annual Meetings of the Population Association of America and the American Sociological Association.

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