Too busy to be interested? Work schedules and inequalities in political interest

Motivation. Political interest is a gateway resource: it shapes what citizens learn, which issues they track, and whether they act—through voting, contacting officials, protesting, donating, or organising. When political interest is unequal, political engagement is unequal. Looking at structural causes of inequalities in political interests, we theorise that demanding and desynchronised work schedules—long weekly hours and unsocial hours (nights/weekends)—depress political interest through two pathways. Building on related research, we argue that direct effects arise from tighter time budgets and reduced cognitive resources for following public affairs. Indirect effects operate via social desynchronisation (disrupted exposure to routine civic cues from family, media, and community life) and through (mental) health, as sustained strain from atypical schedules undermines capacity and motivation to attend to politics. Because interest underpins multiple downstream behaviours and knowledge, identifying these pathways speaks to a broad set of inequalities in political engagement.
Design and data. We analyse multiple waves of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society), tracking individuals over time with repeated measures of work hours (total weekly hours) and schedule characteristics (night and weekend work), alongside standard items on political interest. To separate within-person change from between-person differences, we estimate hybrid (within–between) models that include person-mean components and deviations from those means (Mundlak-type specification). This combines strengths of fixed and random effects: it clarifies how shifts into long/unsocial hours for the same individual relate to changes in interest, while also modelling stable cross-sectional differences. Models include relevant control variables. To distinguish direct from indirect effects, we extend the framework with a panel mediation strategy that incorporates lagged mediators for social desynchronisation proxies and (mental) health, decomposing total effects into within-person direct and indirect components and probing robustness to alternative specifications.
Contribution. Substantively, the study advances an integrated time-scarcity, desynchronisation, and health account of how work structures inequalities in political interest, a foundational antecedent to participation, knowledge, and efficacy. Methodologically, it demonstrates how hybrid panel estimators paired with mediation analysis can illuminate both within-person dynamics and indirect pathways that are obscured in cross-sections or fixed-effects-only designs, informing debates on working-time regulation and strategies for reaching citizens whose jobs structurally limit attention to politics.