Project description
Political effects of deindustrialisation
Deindustrialisation is a major concern because it has resulted in a decline in manufacturing jobs, leading to high rates of unemployment. In turn, this impacts displaced workers and their families and drives entire regions into degradation. Consequently, new political attitudes and behaviours have emerged within these societies. The EU-funded DESPO project will study the period between 1965 and 2015. It will examine a vast number of behaviours covering attitudes towards elections, perception of the political system and level of identification with political parties. It will use large-scale administrative data to establish a unique database measuring deindustrialisation in small geographic areas and innovative statistical techniques to assess the causal effects of the deindustrialisation experience.
Objective
For decades, deindustrialization has inflicted collateral damage far beyond displaced manufacturing workers by affecting the lives of working-class families and driving formerly industrialized areas into deprivation, generating new political fault lines in society. The aim of this project is to reveal how a person’s individual, family, and local community experiences of manufacturing decline transform the way they participate in politics and their political attitudes over the course of their life. DESPO will focus on the long-term consequences by studying a rich time frame which spans five decades of manufacturing decline and its political aftermath (1965-2015). It will examine an exhaustive series of political attitudes and behaviours covering: if and how people vote; what people believe and think about their political system; and how strongly people identify with political parties. The project will use large-scale administrative data to construct a unique database of multi-dimensional measures of deindustrialization for small geographic units that will be linked with individual and household longitudinal data. Finally, the analysis will use state-of-the-art statistical techniques to estimate the causal effects of experiencing manufacturing decline.
Fields of science
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Funding Scheme
ERC-STG - Starting GrantHost institution
20122 Milano
Italy