Organizational Civic Culture: Workplaces as Engines of Democratic Participation

Organizational cultures shape not only workplace outcomes but also civic life. While prior work has largely conceptualized civic culture within geographic units (e.g., country, state, or city), we introduce and evaluate the concept of organizational civic culture---the norms and values within organizations of participation in democratic institutions beyond the workplace. Leveraging a novel dataset containing employment histories and voter turnout records for 28 million Americans, along with a quasi-experimental mover design, we find plausibly causal evidence that coworker voter turnout increases a focal worker’s turnout. The influence of organizational civic culture is especially pronounced in low-turnout elections, among workers who are less civically engaged, among college-educated workers, and in instances where more coworkers share a focal worker's partisanship. In supplementary analysis, we show that these effects spill into workers’ households, suggesting that civic habits acquired at work diffuse to other corners of social life. Overall, our findings identify organizations and employment as previously overlooked but important scaffolds to democratic institutions.