Digitalization and the green transition: different challenges, same policy responses?
How do citizens perceive labor market risks related to digitalization and the green transition, and how do these risk perceptions translate into preferences for social policies? This Colloquium address these questions by studying the policy preferences of individual workers on how governments should deal with the two labour market challenges of digitalization and the green transition. Employing novel cross-country comparative survey data including a vignette experiment for six advanced postindustrial economies, we probe to what extent the different labour market challenges are associated with differences in preferences, distinguishing between support for social investment policies on the one hand and compensatory policies on the other. A first finding is that even though individuals perceive different levels of labour market risk due to the green transition and digitalization, their preferences for social policy responses do not differ systematically across the two risks. Instead, we find that social policy preferences are affected by individual-level and, to some extent, country-level contextual factors. Confirming previous work, higher perceived labour market risk is associated with more support for compensatory policies but less support for social investment.
Speaker: Marius R. Busemeyer, Full Professor of Political Science with a focus on Comparative Political Economy at the University of Konstanz and Speaker of the Excellence Cluster "The Politics of Inequality". His research focuses on comparative political economy and welfare state research, education and social policy, public spending, theories of institutional change and, more recently, public opinion on the welfare state. He studied at Heidelberg and Harvard and held visiting professorships at Harvard, WZB Berlin, Oxford, University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and Amsterdam. He received two major grants from the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the European Research Council (ERC).
Introduction: Francesco Nicoli (Lecturer in Political Science, Politecnico di Torino)