The Politicization of Wage Setting

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Lyttelton, Thomas; Wilmers, Nathan
• 署名单位: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
• 刊物名称: ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCE QUARTERLY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0001-8392
• DOI: 10.1177/00018392261453818
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: POLITICAL-IDEOLOGY; Social activism; Party cues; gender-gap; management; INEQUALITY; pay

摘要

Political realignment in the United States has reshuffled party affiliations across occupational lines. The party of unions and minimum wages is increasingly also the party of managers and professionals. In this article, we investigate whether this realignment among the actors setting wages within firms has politicized wage setting. We first show that Democratic managers pay more to hourly workers than Republican managers do, even when we compare across firms within metro-occupation-industry-year local labor markets. This premium holds only in the bottom half of the earnings distribution and comes only from senior managers and human resource managers. We then show that, consistent with partisan behavior, Democrats respond to partisan cues and pay perceived co-partisans more. Democratic managers become relatively more likely than Republican managers to pay $15 wages specifically, while the Democratic wage premium is larger for Democrat-leaning service jobs. In an experiment in which we randomly assigned manager-employee partisan matches, managers were 10 percentage points more likely to assign co-partisans a higher wage. Finally, we show that the Democratic wage premium has grown in recent years, accounting for 12 percent of extra wage increases for low-wage workers during this period. These results suggest a politicization of wage setting wherein managers' Democratic commitments benefit co-partisan front-line workers.