Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: While researchers examine the influence of social structure on political behavior, they rarely explore the reverse. As studies in discrimination and social closure find that race, ethnicity and gender are criteria on which the privileged distribute resources, exploring the effects of political behavior has the potential to uncover new and emergent processes of inequality. I use POLPAN, a Polish panel data started in 1988/89 with the last wave completed in 2003, to empirically examine whether individual political behavior leaves an indelible mark on social structural position. Specifically, I ask whether voting for the winning party in a new democracy has consequences for changes in income. I argue for two possible mechanisms through which voting for the winning party provides individual material gains; political segmentation of the labor market and psychological mobilization. Winning party is defined as a dichotomous variable indicating whether the respondent voted for the party that garnered the most seats in the parliament and its coalition partner in that election year. Using regression with lagged variables, I find that voting for the winning party positively influences changes in income. Despite radical political changes and the drastically different economic reforms brought by each new post-communist administration, association with the winner brings gains for individuals.