When communities lose manual labor jobs traditionally held by men and see a rise in lower-paying service roles taken by women, residents often shift their political support toward right-wing politicians. This economic and cultural upheaval creates a longing for the traditional male-breadwinner family structure among both men and working-class women. The findings were recently published in the American Journal of Political Science.
Over the past few decades, industrial centers in the United States have undergone drastic economic changes. Mining and manufacturing towns that once relied on thousands of male workers have seen those positions vanish. Coal mining in Appalachia and steel manufacturing in the Midwest used to provide high wages for men without a college degree. As these industries collapsed, new jobs often emerged in care-oriented fields like healthcare and education.
These growing service industries are predominantly staffed by women. This forced a transition in many working-class households, where women entered the workforce or increased their paid labor to make up for the lost income of their husbands. This shift fundamentally altered the traditional division of labor in these local economies.
Richard Clark at the University of Notre Dame, Roza Khoban at the University of Zurich, and Noah Zucker at Princeton University set out to understand the political fallout of this specific transition. They wanted to know how simultaneous male job losses and female job gains affect a community’s voting behavior. The researchers recognized that labor markets in industrial towns are deeply divided by gender.
They theorized that this forced economic rebalancing creates two distinct pressures. For men, losing the role of primary earner threatens their perceived social status. For women, taking on new jobs to replace high-paying industrial work often increases economic strain, as the new jobs generally pay less. The researchers hypothesized that this combination of status anxiety and material scarcity drives voters toward politicians promising a return to traditional family and economic structures.
The team first analyzed survey data from more than 250,000 Americans on their intended voting choices in congressional elections between 2006 and 2020. They combined these individual survey responses with county-level labor market data from the United States Census Bureau. The employment data tracked high-frequency job losses and job gains across different industries and demographic groups.
Specifically, the researchers looked at areas where layoffs of men without a college degree occurred at the same time as an increase in the proportion of working women without a college degree. They then evaluated how these specific labor market conditions correlated with intentions to vote for Republican candidates. The Republican Party platform during this period frequently emphasized traditional family values and promised to revive male-dominated industries like coal and steel.
The researchers found that communities experiencing this gendered labor market shift became more likely to vote for Republican candidates. This shift to the right occurred among men regardless of their educational background. Men without a college degree were directly affected by the job losses and the corresponding loss of economic standing.
Men with a college degree, while insulated from the immediate job losses, also shifted their voting intentions to the right. The researchers attribute this to a perceived cultural threat to traditional gender hierarchies, as these men still place high cultural value on male-dominated manual labor. Women without a college degree also shifted rightward, responding to the economic strain affecting their households and communities. In the main analysis, women with a college degree showed no significant shift in their voting intentions, which the researchers attribute to their relative insulation from the economic and cultural fallout of working-class job losses.
To see how these shifting roles altered attitudes inside the home, the researchers then examined data from a large study tracking thousands of Americans born between 1957 and 1964. They tracked the participants over several decades, monitoring their household income and the percentage of earnings contributed by each spouse. The survey also tracked the participants’ attitudes toward traditional family structures over time.
Participants were repeatedly asked if they agreed that it is better for a man to achieve outside the home while the woman takes care of the family. The researchers aggregated the answers to measure each participant’s support for a male-breadwinner family model.
The data revealed that when men lost their position as the primary earner, they expressed much stronger support for a traditional male-breadwinner household. This reaction was especially pronounced when a man’s own income dropped substantially compared to his past earnings. The researchers found this defensive reaction to be consistent across men of all educational backgrounds, indicating a widespread attachment to traditional gender roles among men.
For women, entering the workforce year-round typically fostered more progressive gender attitudes, provided the overall household income remained stable. When total household earnings fell well below their previous peak, the progressive effect of working vanished. Women taking on lower-paying service jobs to replace high-paying industrial jobs often faced increased time constraints and domestic burdens.
These women were working more hours but failing to recover the family’s previous level of wealth. Among women whose household income had fallen to half or less of its peak, year-round work no longer reduced support for traditional family structures; the relationship turned slightly positive, though not statistically significant. The researchers argue that such women may view the old economic model, where a single male income could comfortably support a family, as a more stable path to financial security than their current reality. In the one survey wave that asked about party identification, support for these traditional family models was strongly correlated with identifying as a Republican.
These findings capture relatively short-term political reactions to economic disruptions within specific generations. Over several generations, a sustained shift in household labor might eventually normalize new gender roles. The researchers suggest that future generational turnover could lead to more equitable attitudes as younger populations grow up with different baseline expectations about gender and work.
The structure of a country’s welfare system also likely dictates how these labor transitions play out politically. The United States relies heavily on family-based caregiving, which places a heavy burden on working women. In nations with extensive state-sponsored childcare and stronger social safety nets, such as Scandinavian countries, the transition might look entirely different.
In places where government policies relieve the unpaid caregiving burdens on women, voters might have more freedom to support the new labor market structure. Without the severe time and financial pressures observed in the American working class, female voters might mobilize in favor of progressive policies rather than wishing for a return to an industrial past.
The study, “Breadwinner backlash: The gendered effects of industrial decline,” was authored by Richard Clark, Roza Khoban, and Noah Zucker.