Individual vulnerability to industrial robot adoption increases support for the radical right

Abstract

The increasing success of populist and radical-right parties is one of the most remarkable developments in the politics of advanced democracies. We investigate the impact of industrial robot adoption on individual voting behavior in 13 western European countries between 1999 and 2015. We argue for the importance of the distributional consequences triggered by automation, which generates winners and losers also within a given geographic area. Analysis that exploits only cross-regional variation in the incidence of robot adoption might miss important facets of this process. In fact, patterns in individual indicators of economic distress and political dissatisfaction are masked in regional-level analysis, but can be clearly detected by exploiting individual-level variation. We argue that traditional measures of individual exposure to automation based on the current occupation of respondents are potentially contaminated by the consequences of automation itself, due to direct and indirect occupational displacement. We introduce a measure of individual exposure to automation that combines three elements: 1) estimates of occupational probabilities based on employment patterns prevailing in the preautomation historical labor market, 2) occupation-specific automatability scores, and 3) the pace of robot adoption in a given country and year. We find that individuals more exposed to automation tend to display higher support for the radical right. This result is robust to controlling for several other drivers of radical-right support identified by earlier literature: nativism, status threat, cultural traditionalism, and globalization. We also find evidence of significant interplay between automation and these other drivers.

With status decline in sight, voters turn radical right: how do experience and expectation of status decline shape electoral behaviour?

“…With regard to the electoral behaviour of voters whose status had declined, our findings depart somewhat from those of recent studies, which showed that these voters favour radical right parties, or radical left parties (if present, and if they and their parents have higher socioeconomic status) (e.g., Anelli et al, 2021;Ballard-Rosa et al, 2022;Burgoon et al, 2019;Gidron and Hall, 2019;Kurer, 2020;Kurer and Staalduinen, 2022). There are several reasons for these different findings.…”

“…Although this burgeoning scholarship demonstrates the political implications of voters' subjective social status, there is still ambiguity as to whether the relationship between status decline and support for radical right and radical left parties is led by the experience of status decline, or expectation of status decline or both. Within this scholarship, most studies argue that experience of status decline influences support for radical parties (e.g., Anelli et al, 2021;Ballard-Rosa et al, 2022;Bolet, 2022;Burgoon et al, 2019;Gest et al, 2018;Kurer and van Staalduinen 2022). A smaller number of studies raise an equally pertinent point: expectations of status decline also trigger support for radical right parties (Engler and Weisstanner, 2020;Häusermann et al, 2021;Im et al, 2019;Iversen and Soskice, 2020;Iversen, 2021;Mayer, 2015).…”

Automation, Digitalization, and Artificial Intelligence in the Workplace: Implications for Political Behavior

“…An innovative recent contribution by Anelli et al (2021) provides further evidence for a link between automation risk and radical right support. They argue that measures of automation risk based on current occupation underestimate the true scale of the phenomenon because workers in ostensible low-risk jobs, e.g., in sales or services, might very well be canonical automation losers.…”

“…Their existing jobs could be either due to direct replacement in previous employment or indirect replacement in the sense that labor market entrants may be unable from the start to find stable and better-paid jobs in a shrunk manufacturing sector. Combining preautomation probabilities of working in a given occupation with individual automation risk scores from Frey & Osborne (2017) and the pace of regional robotization, Anelli et al (2021) compute a measure of individual exposure to automation that aims to capture such direct and indirect replacement distinct from current employment. Measured as such, individual vulnerability to industrial robot adoption increases support for the radical right across 13 Western European countries.…”

“…On balance, the net change in the regional composition of the electorate may actually favor parties from the New Left rather than antiestablishment forces because workers in occupations dominating the growing sectors typically hold more progressive political values (Kitschelt & Rehm 2014). To be sure, aggregate welfare gains at the regional level likely mask certain disruptive consequences of automation (see Anelli et al 2021). But in thinking about the political consequences of technological change in general, such equilibrium effects appear as an important corrective to more specific studies on particularly exposed parts of the voting population.…”