Off to a Bad Start: Unemployment and Political Interest during the 'Impressionable Years'

There is a classical literature in political economy arguing that negative labour market experiences, such as unemployment, might depress political participation and political interest. Political psychologists have found, however, that political participation and interest become habitual and are therefore resilient to change over the life course. In this perspective, labour market experiences should have a stronger effect on participation and interest, if they occur at a young age, that is, during the impressionable years. In this paper, we use panel data and within-case estimation to analyse the effect of unemployment on political interest, which is a hard test for the hypothesis, because political interest is generally found to be very stable over time. We show that unemployment indeed has a negative effect on political interest among young labour market entrants. This negative effect, we demonstrate, is primarily the result of the important role of political socialisation in the workplace, because the negative effect is particularly strong among young labour market entrants scoring low on extraversion. As extraverts generally have larger social networks, they are less dependent on their political socialisation in the workplace.