Political discrimination against job applicants is being investigated

While a lot of attention has been paid to discrimination based on job applicants' gender or ethnicity, little is known about labour market discrimination based on political affiliation.

The ambition of the research project ‘Politics at Work: Uncovering Partisan Discrimination in Hiring’ is to expand our understanding of discrimination based on political affiliation.

‘If individuals are discriminated against because of their political affiliation, it undermines meritocracy and weakens social integration across political divides,’ says Diana-Roxana Galos, who is behind the project.

An overlooked type of discrimination

Firstly, the researchers will identify the subtle signals that employers associate with political affiliation – and thus potentially discriminate on the basis of when evaluating applicants.

‘Furthermore, we will investigate the existence of discrimination based on political affiliation in a wide range of occupations through survey and field experiments in Denmark,’ says Diana-Roxana Galos.

Her expectation is that the project will contribute to both the academic literature and the current societal debate by shedding light on a current but overlooked form of discrimination.

The research project is supported by Independent Research Fund Denmark with DKK 3.2 million.