Speaker

Turgut Keskintürk
Graduate Student, Sociology
Duke University

Abstract

Career aspirations are formed long before people enter the labor market, but whether and how political ideology is part of that formative process remains unknown. Using national surveys on 9.5 million college freshmen entering U.S. institutions between 1976 and 2010, I show that political ideology structures occupational aspirations well before labor market entry, with a magnitude comparable to racial and socioeconomic sorting. This effect is not reducible to background characteristics, though it is organized within similar educational pipelines. Strikingly, I show that this effect is much stronger among students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds. I theorize that this pattern reflects a “luxury goods” mechanism, arguing that ideology is an occupational amenity whose salience increases with material security. This, I propose, makes ideological congruence an expressive resource unequally distributed across the stratification system.