Schöll, NikolasKurer, Thomas2023-07-102023-07-102024Schöll N, Kurer T. How technological change affects regional voting patterns. Political Sci Res Methods. 2024;12(1):94-112. DOI: 10.1017/psrm.2022.622049-8470http://hdl.handle.net/10230/57514Does technological change fuel political disruption? Drawing on fine-grained labor market data from Germany, this paper examines how technological change affects regional electorates. We first show that the well-known decline in manufacturing and routine jobs in regions with higher robot adoption or investment in information and communication technology (ICT) was more than compensated by parallel employment growth in the service sector and cognitive non-routine occupations. This change in the regional composition of the workforce has important political implications: Workers trained for these new sectors typically hold progressive political values and support progressive pro-system parties. Overall, this composition effect dominates the politically perilous direct effect of automation-induced substitution. As a result, technology-adopting regions are unlikely to turn into populist-authoritarian strongholds.application/pdfeng© The Author(s), 2023. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.info:eu-repo/semantics/articlehttp://dx.doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.62automationoccupational determinants of political preferencespolitical preferencesrobotstechnological changevotersinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess