De-industrializing Societies and the Political Consequences

ongoing

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.