Technological change and support for redistributive politics
研究发现，受技术变革负面影响的工人对再分配的支持因社会阶层而异，且中左政党对经济议题的强调程度影响这些工人的投票选择。
Workers negatively exposed to technological change are shown to prefer economic redistribution but findings about their vote for centre left parties appear less consistent. This study contributes an explanation. First, the spillovers of technological change are borne especially by workers in two social classes (the manual production and the routine non-manual classes) with dissimilar political attitudes including on redistribution. Second, centre left parties vary in their emphasis on economic issues which can affect voters’ support for them. Hence, negatively exposed workers’ vote for centre left parties depends on their social class and the salience these parties accord to redistribution. Using individual-level data from the European Social Survey (Rounds 6–10), party-level data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (2014 and 2019) and occupational-level data, I find that only the routine manual task intensity index positively predicts centre left vote, notably when centre left parties emphasise economic issues. As routine manual tasks are common in the manual working class whereas routine cognitive tasks are common in the routine non-manual class, the findings suggest social class can be useful to disaggregate the various ‘losers’ of technological change and to understand – in tandem with a party supply perspective – their varying political responses.