On May 15, Álvaro Sánchez-García (University of Salamanca) will be the guest speaker at the SPARC Research Group Seminar. The topic of the session will be Of Fields and Ballots: Agricultural Workers' Voting in Comparative Perspective. The seminar will take place at 2:30 p.m. in Room 2 at ICS-ULisboa and online (ID: 975 6636 2593, pass 124396). 

In recent years, large-scale farmer mobilisations across Europe have raised new questions about the political behaviour of agricultural workers. This study investigates how employment in agriculture shapes support for parties along the GAL/TAN axis, combining data from all 11 waves of the European Social Survey (2002–2022) across 26 European countries with party placements from the 2022 and 2024 waves of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey.

Our findings show that agricultural workers are more likely to support traditionalist, authoritarian, and nationalist parties, but also exhibit a greater inclination towards economically left-wing parties. We further explore how these patterns vary depending on whether agricultural workers are self-employed or wage earners, and whether they live in rural or urban areas. The results underscore the importance of occupational identity, economic structure, and territorial context in shaping electoral preferences in contemporary Europe.

Álvaro Sánchez-García is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Salamanca. He has been a visiting researcher at University College Dublin and Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. He is currently conducting a research stay at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS), Universidade de Lisboa. His research focuses on political geography, the rural–urban divide, and support for the populist radical right.