Political Implications of Multiple Jobholding the U.S. Agriculture: An Exploratory Analysis.

The concern of this paper is with the possible political implications of the well-acknowledged trend toward greater off-farm labor marker participation among U.S. farmers and their families. The relevant literature suggests two rival perspectives. The first, derived from 1960s rural sociological research on involvement in agrarian protest by the National Farmers Organizations, implies that part-time farmers' economic insecurity, industrial work experience, union membership, and marginality in the rural community will lead part-time farmers to be more politically liberal or progressive than full-time farmers. A contrary image of the possible political orientations of part-time farmers is based on a variety of data which indicate the general economic and educational privilege of part-time farmers by comparison with full-time farmers. Relatively privileged part-time farmers would thus be expected to be less politically progressive or liberal than full-time farmers. Utilizing data from a 1979 sample survey of New York State farmers, these two contrasting images of the political concomitants of part-time farming are explored. Data for the total sample of farmers show small inverse relationships between part-time farming status and indicators of liberal political ideologies, while these relationships tend to be somewhat larger among the subsample of small farmers. Part-time farming families in which the operator has a white-collor off-farm job are found to be a particularly conservative segment among part-time farmers. While there is some tendency for part-time farmers to be more politically conservative than those who farm full-time, the results are largely consistent within emergent view that the socioeconomic differences between full-time and part-time farmers are less than the difference within each category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]