A 24 hours/7 days economy and electoral participation in the UK

Two recent changes in the labour market conditions are noteworthy. Along with increasing precarity and economic insecurity in recent decades, we witness a rising trend in long working hours in developed countries (e.g., >45 hours per week). Work timing has also become more unsociable (evenings, nights, and weekends), unpredictable, and precarious (rotating, variable, on-call shifts), especially among lower socioeconomic groups. Time resources are one important prerequisite for political participation. Working long hours and unsociable schedules can diminish or deplete an individual’s free time and mental capacities for gaining adequate political knowledge and following up on public issues, in turn leading to political disengagement. However, only limited cross-sectional research has examined the effect of long work hours and unsociable schedules on electoral participation. This study examines the impact of long work hours and unsociable schedules on electoral participation in the UK, a neoliberalist economy, and heterogenous effects by education and occupation using longitudinal data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS). We analyzed four waves of the UKHLS data for the national elections taking place in 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019. Our sample included 8000 individuals who were eligible to vote and were in paid employment. We estimated hybrid models to examine both between-individual and within-individual variations simultaneously.
The fixed-effect component of the hybrid models revealed no within-person effects of work hours and work schedules on turnout due to lack of adequate variation in both work time and voting. However, the random-effects component revealed significant between-person effects. Working long hours (=> 45 hours a week) or unsociable schedules (regularly working evenings, nights, and weekends) were both associated with lower turnout, independent of education, income, occupation, and demographic attributes. While long work hours depressed electoral participation in all education groups, the effect appeared to be the strongest among those with lower education. Unsociable work schedules had a negative effect on turnout, not only in managers, professionals and high-level technicians, but also among workers in the clerical/service/sales sector dominated by women.
Our findings suggest that long work time and unsociable work timing are potentially detrimental to the sustainability of democracy as such work conditions depress turnout and likely exacerbate social inequality in electoral participation, in the new economy, with rising trends not only in economic insecurity, but also in long work time and unpredictable or precarious work schedules.