Wednesday, November 5, 2025
12:00pm - 1:30pm
Janice Levin Building, Room 103
Lunch provided, RSVP to Lauraann Walkoviak at lauraann@smlr.rutgers.edu.
Abstract
While it is well-known that spillovers occur between workplaces and civic society, examinations are largely limited to employee voice effects on distal acts like voting. Spillovers between broader employment experiences and socio-politically extreme belief formation are less developed. We theorize that positive employment experiences reduce individual-level socio-politically extreme beliefs through control loss mitigation, anxiety reductions, and exposure to new perspectives. We also propose heterogeneous job empowerment effects. Empirically, we start with European Social Survey (ESS) Round 10 data. Results show that positive employment experiences largely correlate with reductions in socio-politically extreme beliefs. Effects hold after conditioning on confounders, including political ideology, job characteristics, and experiences outside work, and are robust to using earlier ESS data. We also conduct two original experiments to reinforce key findings and address causality. Our outcomes have implications for the wider socio-political consequences of work and suggest that positive work experiences can reduce socio-politically extreme beliefs.
About Our Speaker
Ryan Lamare is Professor of Employment Relations and Human Resource Management at the London School of Economics (LSE). Prior to joining LSE, he was the Reuben G. Soderstrom International Labor Relations Professor in the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has held previous positions at Penn State University, the University of Manchester, and the University of Limerick. He received his PhD in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. Ryan’s main research interests are in quantitative empirical analyses of the interactions between institutions and ER/HR actors. His research consists of two main projects connected to this theme: the relationships between workplace actors and the political arena, and the use of private workplace conflict management systems at organizations. In related projects, he examines the ties between institutions and employee voice at multinational firms, and the ways in which macro-level shocks affect workplaces. He has published widely on these issues at outlets like British Journal of Industrial Relations, ILR Review, and Industrial Relations, as well as top journals in HR and management, work sociology, law, and political science. He is currently Editor-in-Chief at British Journal of Industrial Relations.
