A new study suggests that as communities lose traditional male-dominated industrial jobs and increasingly fill lower-paid service roles with women, voters tilt toward right‑wing politicians. The research, published in the American Journal of Political Science, identifies a political reaction to this economic and cultural upheaval and points to a longing for the traditional male‑breadwinner family model among both men and working‑class women.
Over recent decades, industrial towns in the United States have undergone drastic economic change. Mining towns in Appalachia and steel communities in the Midwest once supported high wages for men without university qualifications; as these industries declined, new opportunities emerged in care‑oriented sectors such as healthcare and education.
These growing service industries are predominantly staffed by women, prompting a shift in many working‑class households where women entered the workforce or increased their paid labour to compensate for the loss of their partners’ income. The result has been a fundamental reconfiguration of the traditional division of labour within local economies.
Richard Clark of the University of Notre Dame, Roza Khoban of the University of Zurich, and Noah Zucker of Princeton University set out to understand the political fallout from this particular transition. They recognised that labour markets in industrial towns are deeply split along gender lines.
The researchers argued that this forced economic rebalancing creates two pressures: for men, the loss of the role of primary earner threatens their perceived social status; for women, taking on new jobs to replace high‑paying industrial work often entails economic strain, as the new roles tend to pay less. They hypothesised that this combination of status anxiety and material scarcity could push voters toward politicians promising a return to traditional family and economic structures.
The team analysed survey data from more than 250,000 Americans on intended voting choices in congressional elections between 2006 and 2020, pairing these responses with county‑level labour market data from the United States Census Bureau. The data tracked high‑frequency job losses and gains across industries and demographic groups.
Specifically, the researchers studied areas where layoffs of men without a university degree coincided with an increase in the share of working women without a university degree. They then assessed how these labour market conditions correlated with intentions to vote for Republican candidates, noting that the party’s platform during this period frequently emphasised traditional family values and a revival of male‑dominated industries.
The findings indicated that communities undergoing this gendered labour shift were more likely to lean toward Republican candidates. The shift was evident among men regardless of educational background, with those without a degree directly affected by job losses and the accompanying loss of economic standing. Men with degrees also moved to the right, attributed to a perceived cultural threat to traditional gender hierarchies.
Women without a degree similarly shifted rightward in response to household economic pressures, while women with a degree showed no significant change in voting intentions, the researchers suggesting relative insulation from the economic and cultural fallout at the working‑class level.
To examine how these changes translated into household attitudes, the study drew on a long‑running cohort study of Americans born between 1957 and 1964. The researchers tracked household income and the proportion of earnings contributed by each spouse over several decades, along with attitudes toward traditional family structures.
When men lost their status as the primary earner, they expressed stronger support for a male‑breadwinner model, particularly when their own income fell substantially. This defensive reaction appeared across educational backgrounds, indicating a broad attachment to traditional gender roles among men.
For women, year‑round labour typically fostered more progressive gender attitudes, provided overall household income remained stable. When total earnings dropped sharply, the progressive effect waned, and women taking on lower‑paid service roles faced greater domestic burdens. Among those whose household income had fallen to half or less of its peak, continuing work did not reduce support for traditional family structures, and in the single wave that gauged party identification, support for traditional family models correlated with Republican identification.
The researchers describe these as relatively short‑term political responses to local economic disruption within specific generations. They caution that, over multiple generations, a sustained shift in household labour could normalise new gender roles, with younger cohorts potentially adopting different baseline expectations about work and family.
The study also notes that the welfare state environment shapes these dynamics. In the United States, which relies heavily on family‑based caregiving, the pressures on working women are acute. By contrast, in countries with extensive state‑funded childcare and stronger social safety nets, the transition might unfold differently, potentially allowing female voters to back progressive policies rather than a return to an industrial past.
The research is titled Breadwinner backlash: The gendered effects of industrial decline and is authored by Richard Clark, Roza Khoban, and Noah Zucker.
