15:00 - 16:40
PS9
Room:
Room: Meeting Room 2.3
Panel Session 9
Mathilde M. van Ditmars - Socio-political consequences of the digital revolution: a new cleavage?
Nikolas Schoell - How technological change affects regional electorates
Henning Finseraas - The Political Consequences of Technological Change that Increases Demand for Low-Skilled Jobs
Aina Gallego - Stop tech? Policy preferences in response to technological change
Magnus Rasmussen - The Great Standardization: Working Hours Around the World
How technological change affects regional electorates
PS9-4
Presented by: Nikolas Schoell
Thomas Kurer 1, 2Nikolas Schoell 3
1 University of Konstanz
2 University of Zurich
3 Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Does technological change fuel political disruption? Drawing on fine-grained labor market data from Germany, this paper examines how technological change affects regional electorates. We first show that the well-known decline in manufacturing and routine jobs in regions with higher robot adoption or investment in information and communication technology (ICT) was more than compensated by parallel employment growth in the service sector and cognitive non-routine occupations. This change in the regional composition of the workforce has important political implications: Workers trained for these new sectors typically hold progressive political values and support progressive pro-system parties. Overall, this composition effect dominates the politically perilous direct effect of automation-induced substitution. As a result, technology adopting regions are unlikely to turn into populist-authoritarian strongholds.