IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/pscirm/v12y2024i1p94-112_6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

How technological change affects regional voting patterns

Author

Listed:
  • Schöll, Nikolas
  • Kurer, Thomas

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Schöll, Nikolas & Kurer, Thomas, 2024. "How technological change affects regional voting patterns," Political Science Research and Methods, Cambridge University Press, vol. 12(1), pages 94-112, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:12:y:2024:i:1:p:94-112_6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S2049847022000620/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:pscirm:v:12:y:2024:i:1:p:94-112_6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/ram .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.