Research

Women face growing exposure to technology-driven job displacement, yet public responses remain underexplored. We argue that support for social protection is gender-selective: because persistent gender inequality positions men as primary earners, the public views men's job losses as more consequential and demands stronger protection than for comparable losses among women. We test this with a preregistered survey experiment (n = 1,697) in South Korea. Exposure to male displacement increases support for ex-ante protective measures, while female displacement leaves attitudes unchanged. Male layoffs are more often perceived as involving primary earners, whereas normative evaluations of technology-driven disruption do not vary by the gender of displaced workers. This contrast is concentrated among respondents who endorse traditional gender norms, consistent with a logic of gender-selective protection in which concerns tied to breadwinner identity shape whose employment warrants protection.

Many of the richest social data come as open-ended, write-in responses. Occupational data are a prime example, yet the difficulty of coding such free-text entries has long limited research. We address this challenge by fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) to classify millions of write-in occupation fields into a standardized taxonomy. Treating classification as a text-generation task, we supplement standard occupational descriptions with a large corpus of alternative job titles, generating synthetic data for infrequent occupations. The resulting classifier matches or exceeds the accuracy of the US government’s benchmark tool, especially in the long tail of rare occupations. We use this method to construct the Occupational Partisanship in the United States (OPUS) dataset, which assigns partisan scores to nearly all occupations in the O*NET standard classification. Two findings illustrate its potential: (i) occupation predicts partisan identity as well as, or better than, county of residence; and (ii) majority-female occupations lean consistently Democratic. Our approach provides a low-cost, generalizable framework for classifying write-in data and a new empirical lens on the political structure of the American labor market.

A growing literature connects automation to immigration politics, but less is known about how citizens compare immigration and automation directly as sources of worker displacement. This paper asks whether citizens judge the same economic outcome differently when job loss is attributed to migrant labour rather than labour-saving technology. Using a pre-registered vignette experiment in the United Kingdom and Sweden (n = 1,050), we find that immigration-led displacement is consistently evaluated more negatively than a generic layoff, whereas automation-led displacement is not. Swedish respondents differentiate more sharply between sources than British respondents, though this cross-national difference is suggestive rather than conclusive. We then use OECD Risks That Matter 2024 data, covering 22 countries in Europe and North America, to examine whether a related pattern appears in preferences over labour-shortage responses. Across countries, the preference gap between technology and migration is driven primarily by differences in support for migration, not technology. The study shows that the legitimacy of economic adjustment is source-dependent: displacement linked to migration carries a political penalty that automation does not consistently attract.

Population aging is reshaping the agenda of the welfare state, turning labor scarcity into a problem that cuts across family policy, pension and retirement policy, migration, gender and labor market activation, working time, and the governance of workplace technology. Yet little is known about how citizens evaluate this menu of responses when asked to weigh the instruments side by side. Using the 2024 OECD Risks That Matter survey across 27 countries, this paper provides a first comparative map of public receptivity to six labor shortage policy instruments. First, public support follows a clear and cross-nationally consistent hierarchy. While technology adoption, activation of women and underrepresented groups, and moving part-time workers into full-time hours attract broad support, migration is consistently the least popular, and longer working lives and pronatalism occupy a contested middle. Second, demographic and socioeconomic cleavages are concentrated on the instruments that most directly affect each group, rather than reflecting a general orientation toward government action. Third, the six items share only modest common variance, so support for one instrument is a weak guide to support for the others. The findings speak to the political feasibility of alternative social policy responses to demographic change.