We Were The Robots: Automation and Voting Behavior in Western Europe

Abstract

We investigate the impact of robot adoption on electoral outcomes in 14 Western European countries, between 1993 and 2016. We employ both official election results at the district level and individual-level voting data, combined with party ideology scores from the Manifesto Project. We measure exposure to automation both at the regional level, based on the ex-ante industry specialization of each region, and at the individual level, based on individual characteristics and pre-sample employment patterns in the region of residence. We instrument robot adoption in each country using the pace of robot adoption in other countries. Higher exposure to robot adoption is found to increase support for nationalist and radical-right parties. Unveiling some potential transmission channels, higher robot exposure at the individual level leads to poorer perceived economic conditions and well-being, lower satisfaction with the government and democracy, and a reduction in perceived political self-efficacy.

The Surge of Economic Nationalism in Western Europe

“…Considering that the standard deviations of the vote shares for these party families, net of country-year fixed effects, are 4 and 12 percentage points, respectively, these effects are quite consequential. Similarly, in our cross-country study on the role of automation (Anelli, Colantone, and Stanig 2019), we find that a one standard deviation increase in robot exposure at the regional level leads to an increase of almost 2 percentage points in support for the radical right. Along the same lines, Dal Bó et al (2018) estimate that a one standard deviation higher share of automation-vulnerable workers in a municipality is associated with more than 2 percentage points higher support for the radical right in Sweden.…”

Fear of Robots and Life Satisfaction

“…34 There is less research on the impact robotics has on people's behaviour. Papers by Frey et al [32] and Anelli et al [3] focus on voting behaviours of people from regions in the US, Europe and the UK respectively that are adversely affected by robotic automation. They find evidence that these regions are more likely to vote for populist leaders.…”

“…This is at odds with Taipale et al [61] who use Eurobarometer data from a 2012 survey and find that use of robots for caring was supported more by pensioners. 3 The prediction of consistently lower average working hours over time due to rising productivity is hardly new with John Maynard Keynes in his 1930 lecture titled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren arguing that by the 1970s the workers in the UK would be working a 15-h week. Keynes saw this as a good thing driven by innovation and technology that increases productivity and economic growth.…”

Automation and the Future of Work: How Rhetoric Shapes the Response in Policy Preferences

“…However, the addition of rhetoric significantly increases the group's preferences for redistributive policies. As such, while observational studies find that exposure to automation to date has been associated with growth in support for far-right and nationalist political parties (Anelli, Colantone, and Stanig 2018;Dal Bó et al 2018;Frey, Berger, and Chen 2018;Gingrich 2019;Im et al 2019), this study suggests that, as more-educated workers are increasingly exposed to automation, a key political outcome could be greater resistance to redistribution. Nevertheless, the results of this study also suggest that the adoption of carefully designed rhetoric may be capable of counteracting such resistance.…”

“…presents the estimated effects of each treatment on respondents' agreement that, going forward, the government should implement each of seven redistributive policies. In light of observational findings that exposure to automation is associated with increased support for nationalist political parties(Anelli, Colantone, and Stanig 2018;Frey, Berger, and Chen 2018;Dal Bó et al 2018;Im et al 2019;Gingrich 2019),…”