Are Temporary Workers Politically Alienated?

Abstract

In the previous chapters, policy preferences, party support, and voting behaviour of temporary workers have been analysed. The underlying assumption was that these workers are integrated in the political process, that is, that they participate in elections. However, as documented in the introduction and in Chapter 3, there are contributions warning about a possible alienation of outsiders, such as temporary workers. And indeed, the analysis of the German case in the previous chapter has shown that temporary workers, under certain conditions, have a dramatically higher likelihood to abstain from voting. This chapter will analyse the alienation hypothesis in more detail.