2025/01/01 by Gregory Lyon · 1 voice · 1 citation
Health Professions · Social Sciences · #Occupational Health and Safety Research #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence
paper · doi:10.1093/poq/nfaf007
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Abstract Workplace injuries and fatalities may be caused by systemic factors such as unsafe working conditions or by individual factors such as individual worker behavior. Do liberals/Democrats and conservatives/Republicans have different views of workplace injury causation? Extensive research on ideology and behavior suggests that there should be a clear ideological difference in workplace injury causal attribution, with liberals embracing systemic explanations and conservatives embracing individual-based explanations. This study challenges the prevailing theory of ideology and causal attribution and argues that ideology is moderated by class in the context of workplace issues. I present the first-ever empirical test of the extent to which ideology shapes beliefs of workplace injury causation with an original survey of the American public. While attribution of workplace injury is affected by ideology and partisanship, with liberals/Democrats overall holding more pro-worker views and rejecting individual-based explanations for workplace injuries, income has a strong moderating effect among conservatives/Republicans, such that low-income Republicans are just as likely to express pro-worker sentiment as high-income Democrats. The results highlight the importance of class and the workplace and the limits of ideologically driven perceptions about how and why workers are injured.