Politics in the
US Workplace
A research initiative and open data project to understand the role of politics in the workplace—with partisan estimates for organizations, industries, occupations, and metros.
Geographic Polarization
Political alignment varies significantly by region. Our analysis of metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) reveals distinct geographic trends, highlighting the polarization between urban centers and rural areas.
Explore Map →Sector Partisanship
Compare the distribution of employer partisanship across major economic sectors. See how political alignment varies between industries like Technology, Energy, and Finance.
View Sector Data →Industry & Occupation Breakdown
Drill down into the partisan composition of specific occupations.
By Industry
Explore HierarchyBy Occupation
Explore HierarchyOrganization Spotlight
Search and analyze specific employers. Get detailed breakdowns of partisan leanings within major organizations and compare them against industry averages.
Find Organization →Latest Research
View Research →VRscores: A Voter Registration-Based Approach for Measuring Workforce Politics
This paper introduces VRscores, a workplace-level measure of employee partisanship constructed by linking U.S. voter registrations to electronically available profiles of workers covering 2012 to 2024. The organizational-level dataset measures the partisanship of 24.5 million workers across more than 534,000 employers with at least five employees in our data. We release this employer-level dataset as well as additional datasets that report VRscores at the firm, occupation, industry, and MSA levels. We show that our data cover substantially more employees and organizations than donation-based approaches to measuring political ideology. We also show that VRscores are more representative of employees in terms of partisanship, seniority, occupation, and industry. VRscores and donation-based measures are only moderately correlated (r = 0.51) and differ in their dichotomous classification (Democratic vs. Republican) of a given workplace for one in five companies.
Political Segregation in the US Workplace
Using a novel dataset created by matching employment histories with voter registration data for 45.3 million workers, we provide the first large-scale estimate of workplace political segregation in the United States. We present four main findings. First, partisans are strongly segregated by workplace. The average Democrat's coworkers are 11.7 percentage points more Democratic than the average Republican's; the magnitude of workplace political segregation is similar to segregation by gender. There is considerable geographic variation in the extent to which individuals experience greater political segregation at work or in the neighborhoods where they live. Even after controlling for sorting by geography, industry, and occupation, substantial political segregation remains. Second, segregation is largest among those who are politically active and those who plausibly enjoy greater market power. Third Republicans experience significantly higher exposure to Democrats at work than vice versa, with the median Republican working in an environment where 50% of their coworkers are Democrats, compared to 32% of Republican co-workers for the median Democrat. Fourth, political workplace segregation has increased only modestly since 2012.
Organizational Civic Culture: Workplaces as Engines of Democratic Participation
Organizational cultures shape not only workplace outcomes but also civic life. While prior work has largely conceptualized civic culture within geographic units (e.g., country, state, or city), we introduce and evaluate the concept of organizational civic culture -- the norms and values within organizations of participation in democratic institutions beyond the workplace. Leveraging a novel dataset containing employment histories and voter turnout records for 28 million Americans, along with a quasi-experimental mover design, we find plausibly causal evidence that coworker voter turnout increases a focal worker's turnout. The influence of organizational civic culture is especially pronounced in low-turnout elections, among workers who are less civically engaged, among college-educated workers, and in instances where more coworkers share a focal worker's partisanship. In supplementary analysis, we show that these effects spill into workers' households, suggesting that civic habits acquired at work diffuse to other corners of social life. Overall, our findings identify organizations and employment as previously overlooked but important scaffolds to democratic institutions.