Cohort: POLS 36th

Topic of the thesis: The impact of automation on the European labor market: nationalism and welfare support class coalitions.

Abstract: In my doctoral research project I would like to raise, and deal with, two research questions. Firstly, I would like to test whether technological change influences the electoral behavior of individuals belonging to different social classes, particularly the middle class, in four countries representative of each welfare regime, fostering nationalist sympathies. I will adopt the "routine-biased technical change" as my theoretical framework. Working with the European Social Survey's dataset, I expect to find a causal relation between the exposure to automation risk of individuals belonging to social classes, measured by the "Routine Task Index", and the propensity for voting far-right parties. This evidence will be compared with the explanatory power of indexes measuring the attitude towards migrants for nationalist support. I will also consider the mediating role of welfare policies on political preferences, both at the micro and macro levels. Secondly, I would assess the possible impact of employment change triggered by the spread of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) on the class structure, investigating the potential emergence of class coalitions supporting the welfare state in the next future. I will use panel data to track the shift of workers through different occupations, expecting to find a clearly polarized jobs clustering on the skill distribution in the Central European and Anglo-Saxon countries, while a converging societal trend is expected to characterize the Scandinavian and Mediterranean clusters.

Research interests: Welfare state - labor market - social stratification - comparative political economy.

Graduated from: LUISS.

Degrees obtained: BA in Political Science – MA in Government and Policy.

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