Secular Economic Challenges and Public Support for Policy Interventions. Technological change and globalization in a randomized survey experiment in eight countries

Globalization and technological change are arguably the most prominent sources of structural labour market changes in advanced industrialized economies. Policy experts and economists frequently debate many possibilities for policy responses to these structural changes, discussing a wide array of political initiatives that vary in terms of generosity, level of governance, different kinds of income maintenance together with or instead of different types of more activating education, and with or without extra protectionist interventions. Public opinions towards a given policy response have been widely researched, both regarding technological change and globalization, to disentangle this wide array of policy options. However, much less understood or researched is how public support compares across policy responses or mixes of policy responses. This is also true of the respected realms of how people view the appropriate policy alternatives or combinations regarding technological change and globalization. Which sources of economic risk inspire the most or least support from populations for policy interventions to address the risks? And what policy mixes are seen as most or least attractive to address such risks? More income maintenance or educational adjustment assistance? More or less (progressive or flat) taxation? More protectionism or more social policy assistance? National, local or more global governance? The paper summarized the findings of a large-scale survey experiment that provides answers to these questions. The analysis are based on two randomised survey experiments fielded in the second half of 2020 among 20,000 respondents and carried out in eight industrialised democracies (Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States of America). Randomised survey experiments allow establishing causal links between certain policy features and the respondents’ preferences. In detail, the two ‘conjoint experiments’ used in this study, one framed and focused on policies to address technological risks and another framed and focused on policies to address globalization risks, allow to understand, in the eight economies analysed, the level of public support on specific policies aimed at mitigating structural changes due to two risks considered. Overall, findings indicate that policies proposed are generally well-received by respondents. Contrary to our expectations, respondents do not meaningfully differ in assessing the policies to address technology instead of globalization risks. This result suggests that respondents’ preferences for social policy remedies are consistent no matter which particular threat they face. Furthermore, the analysis reveals that respondents express a consistent preference against several policy options transversal to the policy dimensions considered in the study.