Ownership, participation, and political behaviors: A latent-class analysis approach to democratic spillover

For decades, citizen participation in important political decisions has declined and the promotion of democratic ideas in the world of work has become less significant. This study tests the ‘spillover thesis’ advanced by Carole Pateman, which argues that democratic participation in the workplace will ‘spill over’ into political participation. This study incorporates broad-based employee ownership, which provides employees with access to formal collective ownership of the company they work for, into the theoretical framework of the spillover thesis. This study also applies the latent-class analysis technique to identify the patterns of political behaviors. The results identified distinct patterns of political behaviors and demonstrated that demographic factors as well as differences in political efficacy contributed to the differences between patterns.