Research seminar: Orsa Kekezi

Title: Declining Occupations and Voting

Speaker: Orsa Kekezi

Affiliation: Researcher at the Swedish Institute for Social Research and an assistant professor at the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics (CEnSE). Link to bio.

Abstract: What happens to people's political participation, ideological orientation, and party choices when they see their occupations decline and disappear? We show that Swedes employed in occupations that declined between the mid-1980s and the mid-2010s were less likely to vote in the 2022 parliamentary election than Swedes of the same age, education, and income in 1985, especially when the occupational decline was associated with the introduction of specific labor-replacing technologies. We further show that individuals whose original occupations had declined because of new technologies tended to vote left whereas those in occupations that declined for other reasons tended to go to the right. Our evidence comes from a unique dataset that links a representative national survey of Swedish voters to high-quality register data covering the entire occupational histories of the respondents. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the long-run political consequences of occupational decline.

Please sign up by 12/4 for sake of coffee.