“Restrict foreigners, not robots”: Partisan responses to automation threat

Abstract

Recent scholarship on technological change highlights its negative impacts on employment and wages. However, a decade of nationally representative surveys show that Americans hold favorable views toward technology despite concerns over labor displacement. How do people cope with employment threats from a trend they consider desirable? Using a survey experiment, this paper argues that people opt to buffer domestic workers from technological threats with substitute policies against outgroups that they believe could improve wages and employment prospects. Specifically, direct cues about technological displacement make Republicans more likely to demand tighter restrictions on immigration and Democrats more likely to support higher tariffs. In other words, citizens respond to automation anxiety by blaming and penalizing groups that they consider unwelcome or objectionable, depending on their partisanship. Respondents remained reluctant to express support for technological restrictions. Thus, automation anxiety may intensify resistance to globalization, but not necessarily technology.

Attitudes toward automation and the demand for policies addressing job loss: the effects of information about trade-offs

“…Further details regarding the sampling method, quotas, and treatment group randomization are available in the online Appendix. Although Cint's samples are not representative of each country's general population, they approximate the population distributions on key variables, while maximizing the internal validity of experimental findings, in line with many prior studies of labor market shocks (Di Tella and Rodrik, 2020;Wu, 2023;Zhang, 2022). Furthermore, previous research using online platforms, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Lucid, has demonstrated that convenience and representative samples can yield comparable experimental results (Berinski et al, 2012;Huff and Tingley, 2015;Mullinix et al, 2015;Coppock and McClellan, 2019).…”

“…Di Tella and Rodrik (2020) prime respondents with several types of labor market disruptions and find that both trade shocks and automation are positively associated with the demand for protectionism but not other social transfers (the effects of trade are stronger than those of automation). Other studies provide more mixed findings, including null effects of automation primes on public policy preferences, with considerable variation across social subgroups (Jeffrey, 2021;Ladreit, 2022;Wu, 2023;Zhang, 2022). In summary, these findings indicate mixed results regarding the impact of automation exposure on support for ameliorative policy responses.…”

“…When it comes to technology, workers may favor policies that attempt to prevent or disincentivize the adoption of new technologies (Abbott and Bogenschneider, 2018;Dauth et al, 2021). Citizens may also react to fears of automation and job insecurity by directing blame and punitive attitudes toward groups they deem undesirable; they may, for example, call for governmental measures against other sources of job threats that they attribute to external factors, such as immigration or trade (Wu, 2023).…”

“…Several studies find null average treatment effects of automation primes on public policy preferences, although some report considerable heterogeneity across sociodemographic subgroups (Jeffrey, 2021;Ladreit, 2022;Wu, 2023;Zhang, 2022;Gallego et al, 2023). While most of this research uses common treatments, whereby an automation shock affects one hypothetical firm (Di Tella and Rodrik, 2020;Ladreit, 2022;Wu, 2023;Zhang, 2022;Gallego et al, 2023), and similar dependent variables, such as support for different policies in response to automation shocks, there is more variation in how the studies define the control groups: some compare automation shocks to an unspecified labor market shock, whereas others compare automation to particular shocks, such as offshoring. Our study, in contrast, compares a costs-only condition to treatments that emphasize both the costs and benefits-either vague or specific-of automation.…”

Who Can Assert Ownership Over Automation? Workplace Technological Change, Populist and Ethno-nationalist Rhetoric, and Candidate Support

“…Moreover, there are psychological reasons why voters may prefer to blame trade and/or migration over automation for economic decline. On the one hand, voters are often quite favorably disposed toward technology, which they associate with positive lifestyle and economic benefits (Gallego et al, 2021;Mutz, 2021;Wu, 2022). In contrast, immigration and trade are associated with easily identifiable out-groups-immigrants and foreign countries-that can be blamed for what may actually be technology-induced job loss, and are also associated with more straightforward policy solutions, such as trade tariffs and border restrictions Kurer, 2020;Mutz, 2021).…”