Material resources and political attitudes among self-employed

Project description

The project is on differences in material resources and political attitudes among self-employed. We are interested both in detecting variation within the group as well as in relation to employees.

Previous research on self-employed has not focused on material conditions or political attitudes, and research on material conditions and political attitudes has not taken the heterogeneity among self-employed into account. The self-employed are in different industrial branches and differ according to gender, ethnicity, and education.

The project´s key assumption is that this heterogeneity is important for explaining differences in material conditions and political attitudes among the self-employed. Here, the role of local labor market contexts will also be analyzed. Another part of the project attempts to map personality traits among self-employed and employees and analyzes how these co-vary with differences in political attitudes and material conditions.

Empirically, the self-employed are a rather small group. This is a major reason for being neglected by previous research. In our survey (n=8000), the group will be overrepresented. The quantitative data will be analyzed both by descriptive statistics and more complex multivariate methods, such as multilevel and latent class analysis.

We believe that the project will contribute with important knowledge in a number of ways, but particularly within the fields of political sociology and research on living conditions.