Labour market problems and political integration

This chapter focuses on the link between individual labour market problems and political integration, a topic that has been at the core of prominent social science debates for almost a century. The chapter provides a historical survey of theoretical approaches and, in passing, a necessarily selective summary of empirical patterns documented in contemporary research on labour market problems and political integration. It emphasizes the importance of theories and methods that give justice to the subjective experience of labour market problems and the full range of socio-emotional mechanisms that might link them to political integration. It concludes that future research would benefit from more dialogue with qualitative research into political disintegration as well as from encompassing perspectives that jointly theorize different political consequences that are currently often studied in isolation.