Divisive jobs: three facets of risk, precarity, and redistribution

A central challenge in understanding public opinion shifts is identifying whose opinions change. Political economists try to uncover this by exploring voters' economic vulnerability, particularly the relationship between labor-market risk and redistribution preferences. Predominantly, however, such work imputes risk from occupational or sectoral characteristics. Due to within-occupational inequality in exposure to risk, considerable variation remains unexplored. I propose an individual-level, dynamic account of risk inferred from job tenure, contract type, and expectations of job security. These aspects, importantly, account for individual variation in risk and the possibility that one's experience of risk may change across time. The results indicate the usefulness of this approach to risk in understanding changes in social spending preferences

Mind the Gap: Why Wealthy Voters Support Brexit

Wealth provides self-insurance against financial risk, reducing risk-aversion. We apply this insurance mechanism to electoral behaviour, arguing that a voter who has a desire for a change to the status quo -- and who is wealthy -- is more likely to vote for that change than a voter who lacks the same self-insurance. We apply this argument to the case of Brexit in the UK, which has been widely characterized as a vote by the economically left-behind. Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth. We corroborate our theory using two separate panel surveys, accounting for unobserved individual level heterogeneity, and using a survey experiment. The findings have implications for the potential wider role of wealth-as-insurance in electoral behavior, and for understanding the Brexit case

Risk and Health Policy Preferences: Evidence from the UK COVID-19 Crisis

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a large shock to the risk of acquiring a disease that represents a meaningful threat to health. We investigate whether individuals subject to larger increases in objective health risk -- operationalised by occupation-based measures of proximity to other people -- became more supportive of increased government healthcare spending during the crisis. Using panel data which tracks UK individuals before and after the outbreak of the pandemic, we implement a fixed-effect design which was pre-registered before the key treatment variable was available to us. While individuals in high-risk occupations were more worried about their personal risk of infection, and had higher COVID death rates, there is no evidence that increased health risks during COVID-19 shifted attitudes on government spending on healthcare, nor broader attitudes relating to redistribution. Our findings are consistent with recent research demonstrating the limited effects of the pandemic on political attitudes

Insuring Against Hunger? The Long-Term Political Consequences of Exposure to the Dutch Famine

Does experiencing a shock alter one's voting behavior? We explore how a specific shock to individuals’ health and human capital accumulation -- in-utero malnutrition -- prompted by the sudden onset of the 1944/45 Dutch Famine affected insurance demand and voting behavior later in life. Given similar socialization patterns, we find conglomerations of affected individuals to be associated with higher support for Left parties more than 50 years after the exposure. Relying on rich administrative data and leveraging the Dutch Famine as a natural experiment, this paper represents an initial effort to investigate and confirm the long-term effects of shocks on political behavior

Mind the gap: why wealthy voters support Brexit

Wealth provides self-insurance against financial risk, reducing risk-aversion. We apply this insurance mechanism to electoral behaviour, arguing that a voter who has a desire for a change to the status quo – and who is wealthy – is more likely to vote for that change than a voter who lacks the same self-insurance. We apply this argument to the case of Brexit in the UK, which has been widely characterized as a vote by the ‘economically left-behind’. Our results show that individuals who lacked wealth are less likely to support leaving the EU, explaining why so many Brexit voters were wealthy, in terms of their property wealth. We corroborate our theory using two separate panel surveys, accounting for unobserved individual level heterogeneity, and using a survey experiment. The findings have implications for the potential wider role of wealth-as-insurance in electoral behavior, and for understanding the Brexit case

Risk and Preferences for Government Healthcare Spending: Evidence from the UK COVID-19 Crisis

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic constituted a large shock to the risk of acquiring a disease that represents a meaningful threat to health. We investigate whether individuals subject to larger increases in objective health risk – operationalized by occupation-based measures of proximity to other people – became more supportive of increased government healthcare spending during the crisis. Using panel data that track UK individuals before (May 2018–December 2019) and after (June 2020) the outbreak of the pandemic, we implement a fixed-effect design that was pre-registered before the key treatment variable was available to us. While individuals in high-risk occupations were more worried about their personal risk of infection and had higher COVID-19 death rates, there is no evidence that increased health risks during COVID-19 shifted either attitudes on government spending on healthcare or broader attitudes relating to redistribution. Our findings are consistent with recent research demonstrating the limited effects of the pandemic on political attitudes