Abstract
AbstractRapid technological change – the digitalization and automation of work – is challenging contemporary welfare states. Most of the existing research, however, focuses on its effect on labor market outcomes, such as employment or wage levels. In contrast, this paper studies the implications of technological change for welfare state attitudes and preferences. Compared to previous work on this topic, this paper adopts a much broader perspective regarding different kinds of social policy. Using data from the European Social Survey, we find that individual automation risk is positively associated with support for redistribution, but negatively with support for social investment policies (partly depending on the specific measure of automation risk that is used), while there is no statistically significant association with support for basic income. We also find a moderating effect of the overall size of the welfare state on the micro-level association between risk and preferences.
Highlights
The consequence of rapid technological change, i.e. digitalization and the automation of work, is a hotly debated topic in both public and academic debates
We find a positive association between automation risk and support for the welfare state broadly defined; in this case, the association is statistically significant only when using the more fine-grained measure provided by Arntz et al The overall positive association between automation risk and support for redistribution holds when including a measure of occupational risk, which takes into account other sources of labor market risk besides technological change
In the case of support for redistribution, an increase in automation risk by one standard deviation is associated with an increase in support by . percentage points, which is significantly smaller than changes in predicted probability associated with a similar change in income or ideology – two variables that are widely known to have a strong effect on welfare state attitudes
Summary
The consequence of rapid technological change, i.e. digitalization and the automation of work, is a hotly debated topic in both public and academic debates. Different from the few previous studies, we adopt a broader perspective on the dependent variable, moving beyond redistribution to include support for basic income as well as social investment employment policies, and we take into account to what extent the welfare state context influences the micro-level association between risk and social policy preferences (cross-level interaction effects). In contrast, those in occupations at high risk of automation could be more likely to prefer continued employment in their current job or rather demand a more generous and income-related unemployment insurance scheme Taken together, these countervailing forces could balance each other out in the aggregate, leading us to expect a weak or no association between tech-related automation risk and support for the UBI. For the first three dependent variables, we employ logistic regression, whereas we use simple linear regression for the fourth variable measuring “welfareism”
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
