Article Summary
Introduction
American politics has become highly polarized, and dislike of politically dissimilar others has also spilled over into interpersonal relationships, with most Americans reporting a strong preference to live near and marry members of their same political party. One relatively unexplored question is whether political polarization also affects employment. Specifically, these authors use an audit study to test whether including political signals in your resume makes you more or less likely to get hired by politically similar and dissimilar others. They argue that employers will be more likely to hire in-partisans than out-partisans for three reasons. First, employers use political identity as a proxy for a potential employee’s values, and assume they will get along better with in-partisans. Second, viewing politics as a team sport, individuals seek to reward team members with jobs and/or to punish members of the opposite team. Finally, people believe that in-partisans are more competent than out-partisans and prefer to hire them accordingly.
Analytical Approach
The authors chose two counties, one highly liberal and one highly conservative, and performed an audit study there, sending out fake resumes to help-wanted ads posted in each county over four months. The authors created six resumes with the same level of skills and experience (assessed with a focus group pre-audit), tailored to each county. They then sent three resumes to each job posting, randomly assigning which resume contained a strong Republican identity, a strong Democratic identity, or no cue of partisanship (i.e. non-partisan resumes listed work experience at a trade organization, while partisan resumes listed experience working on the McCain or Obama campaigns). Ultimately, they send 1,200 resumes to 400 job listings. They then measured whether or not the resumes received a positive response, like an interview or job offer (referred to here as a “callback”).
Main Findings
In the majority-Republican county, Republican resumes had the highest probability of callbacks (19.7 %), followed by non-partisan resumes (17.1 %), followed by Democratic resumes (14.1 %). In the majority-Democratic county, Democratic resumes received the most callbacks (10.1 %), followed by non-partisan resumes (9.6 %), followed by Republican resumes (7.7 %). Meaning, in a Republican area, a Republican job-seeker had to submit an average of 5.1 resumes before getting a callback, while Democrats had to submit 7.1 resumes. In the liberal county, a Democrat needed to submit an average of 9.9 resumes to receive a callback, while a Republican had to submit 13. Overall, while there was mixed evidence on whether signaling a political identity aligned with the majority provided any boost to applicants, there was reliable evidence displaying a differing political identity from the majority imposed a cost on applicants.
Implications
This research expands on work illuminating the non-political consequences of political polarization, demonstrating that in addition to affecting social relationships, partisan identity can also affect who is chosen for which jobs. It relied on an extensive correspondence audit, which combines the internal validity of a controlled experiment with the external validity of applying to real-world labor markets.
Questions left unanswered
The authors briefly addressed the main unanswered question: the applicants in this study were all college-educated men with names generally perceived as White, so it is unclear if partisan identities intersect with other identities to influence hiring patterns. Varying systematically the applicant characteristics in future studies could shed light on these questions.
Methods and Analysis
Was the study and its analyses pre-registered?: No
Did the study rely on proxy variables to measure polarization?: No
Were standard p-value thresholds used (p<.05 or 95% Confidence Intervals that don’t overlap zero)?: Yes
- Largest p-value presented as significant: 0.05
Were correlational results interpreted with causal language?: No
Limitations / Weaknesses
While this work is generally an ambitious and persuasive audit study, the use of only two counties, both relatively urban, does raise concerns about generalizability. It would be helpful to see additional work that covers a wider range of localities, as well as using different applicant identities. Additionally, it appears that appropriate jobs for the audit candidates were selected by researchers. While it makes sense not to send resumes to jobs for which they are obviously not qualified, it does introduce an additional degree of freedom in researcher decisions which could have influenced the outcomes.
Open Data & Analyses
Does the article make the replication data publicly available?: No
Does the article make the replication analysis scripts publicly available?: No
Article Citation
Gift, K., & Gift, T. (2015). Does politics influence hiring? Evidence from a randomized experiment. Political Behavior, 37, 653-675.
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@article{gift2015does,
title={Does politics influence hiring? Evidence from a randomized experiment},
author={Gift, Karen and Gift, Thomas},
journal={Political Behavior},
volume={37},
pages={653--675},
year={2015},
publisher={Springer}
}