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. More specifically, the project answers the following questions: How and why has long-term manufacturing decline affected the political participation, party loyalty, and political attitudes of: a) industrial workers who have been displaced or experienced job insecurity, b) spouses and children of industrial workers who have been displaced or faced job insecurity and c) residents of local areas affected by chronic manufacturing decline?
While much of the research has considered the political impact of deindustrialization as occurring though occupational exposure (for instance job loss, job displacement or job insecurity), this project considers the political impact of deindustrialization through diffuse exposure. Diffuse exposure can occur through family and kin networks, communities and neighborhoods, and also, more generally, growing up in an ‘era’ characterized by deindustrialization. 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) in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany. It will examine an exhaustive series of political attitudes and behaviours: a) if and how people vote; b) what people believe and think about their political system; and c) how strongly people are attached to and identify with political parties.
(see Figure A)
DESPO has three main objectives:
1) to explain how deindustrialization causes an individual, household, class, and local contextual basis for political change by exploiting its local, industrial, and time variation
2) to establish a conceptual and empirical framework for how the uneven experience of deindustrialization across social groups constitutes a basis for political differentiation
3) to construct a unique database of multi-dimensional measures of deindustrialization for small geographic units by repurposing large scale administrative data of business registries for novel use
