Politics and the future of work: Routine work, automation risk and redistributive preferences in the age of populism

Abstract

This chapter surveys political science literature and evidence on the relationship between automation risk among those conventionally defined as ‘routine workers’ and the political behaviour of this vital part of the voting public, including their preferences for more or less redistributive policy agendas according to whether hardship is anticipated or experienced. It first charts the existing research focused on routine work as a particular site where mechanisation is making itself felt within industry and labour markets, before considering the connection posited in recent studies between routine workers and the kinds of status anxiety that are widely taken to have driven the populist upheavals of the past decade. It then considers this status anxiety as the consequence of an anticipated sense of approaching hardship as opposed to experienced hardship. These two situations are then examined for the distinct redistributive preferences studies suggest they motivate. The final parts of the chapter discuss the implications for policy and politics from these preferences, both in terms of the role of political rhetoric in shaping how electoral behaviour responds to structural shifts in employment and in terms of the policy agendas that can be proposed to address them.