The goal of the project is to study how people’s personal histories affect their economic and political behavior, and to study what might affect resistance to extreme political leaders. The project consists of four parts.
In subproject A, we study how individual employment histories influenced redistributive outcomes and voting for Trump. We are using a unique database of more than 40 million resumes from Burning Glass Technologies (BGT), the largest available repository of resumes of job-seekers in the US, and match it with commuting zone-level economic and voting variables. We introduce a new measure of career values to aggregate expected job-related transitions into a single indicator. We then estimate occupational transition matrix to compute average levels of career values in a location, study their heterogeneity by skill level, and relate them to voting behavior. We document career values decline in 2000-2016, and automation and robotization played an important role. Next, we find that low-skilled individuals suffered the most, with their career opportunities deteriorating more than those of high-skilled. We also find that both robotization and career values affected voting for Trump and associated political outcomes in 2016.
In subproject B, we study how negative social experiences during the formative years affect subsequent labor market outcomes, antisocial behavior, and the support of the populist agenda. We examine how corporal punishment in schools in the US affected subsequent educational attainment, employment, antisocial behavior, and voting. We combine the data on corporal punishment with contemporary economic and political outcomes and run our own survey to differentiate between the mechanisms. We find that the abolition of corporal punishment led to worse educational attainment, crime perpetration, and more authoritarian preferences of affected individuals.
In subproject C, we examine what makes people actively resist extremist regimes even at a high personal cost. We study a historical example of resistance to the Nazi regime in Germany during WWII. We use a self-collected dataset on treason cases to measure resistance, combining it with data on bombing and exposure to foreign propaganda. We find that allied bombing led to higher resistance to Nazis and lower morale of the Nazi pilots. We also find important interaction effects with BBC radio.
In subproject D, we study the relationship between populism and complexity. We study if complexity of the environment affects people’s preferences for populism politicians, and if, in turn, populists use simpler policy positions and simpler language in their campaign rhetoric. We find that populists indeed use simpler language and have clear policy positions on fewer issues. Moreover, we find that populists have higher support in times of lower complexity of political environment.
