September 5th, 2010
Politics & Workplace Bullying: 2010 WBI Survey
New research findings from the 2010 Workplace Bullying Institute national scientific survey regarding political party affiliation and political ideology.
Because bullying ignores gender and rank boundaries, it makes sense that hyperaggressive perpetrators of abusive misconduct do not identify with a particular political party. Nor are targets selected principally based on a political ideology.
However, in the 2007 WBI survey and now again in the 2010 WBI national survey, the reported prevalence rates for bullying differ based on party affiliation and ideology. Here are the results and comparisons with the national average.
Question: “At work, what is your experience with any or all of the following types of repeated mistreatment: sabotage by others that prevented work from getting done, verbal abuse, threatening conduct, intimidation or humiliation?”
| National Prevalence Statistics | Bullied Now | Been Bullied | Combined | Witnessed Only | No Bullying Experience |
| 8.8% | 25.7% | 34.5% | 15.5% | 49.6% |
Survey respondents were asked if they identified with one of the two major political parties or if they self-identified as independents.
| Pol Party Affil | Bullied Now | Been Bullied | Combined | Witnessed Only | No Bullying Experience |
| Democratic | 11% | 32% | 43% | 15% | 41% |
| Independent | 9.4 | 26.2 | 35.6 | 13 | 50.8 |
| Republican | 5.7 | 20 | 25.7 | 13.2 | 60.9 |
A similar pattern emerges when respondents were asked to identify their political ideology.
| Ideology | Bullied Now | Been Bullied | Combined | Witnessed Only | No Bullying Experience |
| Liberal | 14.1% | 31% | 44.1% | 17.2% | 37.5% |
| Moderate | 5.9 | 27.1 | 33 | 21.2 | 44.8 |
| Conservative | 6.6 | 22 | 28.6 | 12.3 | 59 |
Thus, Republicans and Conservatives reported less bullying and were more likely to report no experience with bullying at all. In other words, party affiliation and ideology may be serve as a perceptual filter, a lens through which the phenomenon of bullying is interpreted.
Many people do not realize they are being bullied. It is a shameful experience that one does not readily admit to. It’s a stigmatizing act. The findings above illustrate that a conservative perspective makes one less likely to admit that bullying (“repeated mistreatment” as used in the definition in the survey) occurs; conversely, being politically liberal seems to make a person more likely to define observed or experienced misconduct as bullying.
What cannot be determined from the data alone is whether conservatives underestimate bullying that is occurring or if liberals overestimate its occurrence.
WBI Research Director, Gary Namie, PhD
© 2010, Workplace Bullying Institute
Survey 2. Zogby International was commissioned by the Workplace Bullying Institute to conduct an online survey of 2,092 adults from 8/18/10 to 8/23/10. A sampling of Zogby International’s online panel, which is representative of the adult population of the U.S., was invited to participate. Slight weights were added to region, party, age, race, religion, gender, education to more accurately reflect the population. The margin of error is +/- 2.2 percentage points.
Tags: 2010 WBI U.S. Workplace Bullying Survey, conservative, democratic, liberal, moderate, political affiliation, politics, republican, WBI-Zogby, workplace bullying
This entry was posted on Sunday, September 5th, 2010 at 8:59 pm and is filed under Bullying Tutorials, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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When I read the headline, I knew that bullying would be more prevalent on the left of the spectrum than the right. I believe this is because left leaning tends to align with SJ type behaviours, or in other words a tendency towards stability, control and order. Since bullying is often an insecure person’s attempt to stabilise their environment by controlling others (and also to remove percieved threats to that stability), this comes as no great surprise.
I thought this comment was from a troll at first, but the person seems serious. Anyone who is familiar with personality research would know that SJ is the complete opposite of liberalism. I honestly don’t know how to respond to a comment so disconnected from all facts and reality. Just simple observations would demonstrate that liberals are not proponents of maintaining order at all costs.
This makes sense. Conservatives are rugged individualists who tend to see bullying tactics as being competitive; targets deserve to be bullied because they are weak or screw ups. No conservative would admit to being bullied. It is a source of shame and contradicts the credo that the individual is fully responsible for his or her station in life.
An alternative possibility is that conservatives are more likely to bully people based on politics or social issues than are liberals. In that case, liberals would report higher levels of bullying because A) there was objectively measurable bullying based on politics and B) conservatives were more often the perpetrators. I’m not saying this is the case or making a political statement–just pointing out we can’t make the assumption the correlations are strictly an issue of perception.
Jim, Nice alternative explanation. Funny how conservatives like playing victims. It was years of Limbaugh vilifying “liberals” that pushed them into a corner from which they are too timid to emerge. How the politics plays out at work is a matter that you may have pinpointed accurately.