They’re Coming for You! How Perceptions of Automation Affect Public Support for Universal Basic Income

Abstract

Media stories on the economy tout automation as one of the biggest contemporary technological changes in America and argue that many Americans may lose their jobs because of it. Politicians and financial elites often promote a policy of Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a solution to the potential unemployment caused by automation, suggesting Americans should support UBI to protect them from this technological disruption. This linkage and basic descriptive findings are largely untested: we don’t know much about whether Americans support UBI, see automation as a threat to their job, or connect the two in any meaningful way. Using a Mechanical Turk survey of 3600 respondents, we examine the relationship between Americans’ perception of how much automation threatens their jobs, how much automation actually threatens their jobs, and their support for UBI. Our results indicate that while the public does not view automation as the same threat that elites do, Americans who believe their jobs will be automated are more likely to support UBI. These relationships, however, vary considerably by political party.

Keywords

universal basic income automation partisanship public opinion

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Berinsky

A. J.

Huber

G. A.

Lenz

G. S.

(2012). Evaluating online labor markets for experimental research: Amazon. com’s Mechanical Turk. Political Analysis, 20(3), 351–368. https://doi.org/10.1093/pan/mpr057.

Cigna

L. M.

(2022). Looking for a north star? Ideological justifications and trade unions’ preferences for a universal basic income. European Journal of Industrial Relations, 28(2), 129–146. https://doi.org/10.1177/09596801211043094.

Clifford

Ryan

M. J.

Waggoner

P. D.

(2015). Are samples drawn from Mechanical Turk valid for research on political ideology? Research & Politics, 2(4), 2053168015622072. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053168015622072.

Dermont

Weisstanner

(2020). Automation and the future of the welfare state: Basic income as a response to technological change? Political Research Exchange, 2(1), 1757387. https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2020.1757387.

Enns

P. K.

McAvoy

G. E.

(2012). The role of partisanship in aggregate opinion. Political Behavior, 34(4), 627–651. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-011-9176-7.

Eurobarometer . (2023). Fairness, inequality, and intergenerational mobility. Special Eurobarometer.

Feldman

(1988). Structure and consistency in public opinion: The role of core beliefs and values. American Journal of Political Science, 32(2), 416–440. https://doi.org/10.2307/2111130.

Goos

Manning

Salomons

(2014). Explaining job polarization: Routine-biased technological change and offshoring. The American Economic Review, 104(8), 2509–2526. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1983952.

Haidt

(2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Random House Inc.

10.

Jones

J. M.

(2023). Social conservatism in U.S. Highest in about a decade. Politics. [Online; posted 8-June-2023.

11.

Jordan

Ferguson

Haglin

(2022). Measuring and framing support for universal basic income. Social Policy and Administration, 56(1), 138–147. https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12760.

12.

Jordan

Webb

C. M.

Wood

B. D.

(2014). April). The president, polarization and the party platforms, 1944–2012. In The Forum ((Vol. 12, No. 1,, pp. 169–189). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/for-2014-0024.

13.

Lewis-Beck

M. S.

Stegmaier

(2000). Economic determinants of electoral outcomes. Annual Review of Political Science, 3(1), 183–219. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.polisci.3.1.183.

14.

Manyika

(2017). What’s now and next in analytics, AI, and automation. McKinsey Global Institute, 28(1), 1–12.

15.

Mullinix

K. J.

Leeper

T. J.

Druckman

J. N.

Freese

(2015). The generalizability of survey experiments. Journal of Experimental Political Science, 2(2), 109–138. https://doi.org/10.1017/XPS.2015.19.

16.

Parolin

Siöland

(2020). Support for a universal basic income: A demand-capacity paradox? Journal of European Social Policy, 30(1), 5–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/0958928719886525.

17.

Poole

K. T.

Rosenthal

(2007). On Party Polarization in Congress. Daedalus, 136(3), 104–107. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20028136.

18.

Rosenfeld

(2018). The polarizers: Postwar architects of our partisan era. University of Chicago Press.

19.

Schwander

Vlandas

(2020). The left and universal basic income: The role of ideology in individual support. Journal of International and Comparative Social Policy, 36(3), 237–268. https://doi.org/10.1017/ics.2020.25.

20.

Sundquist

J. L.

(1983). Dynamics of the party system: Alignment and realignment of political parties in the United States. The Brookings Institution.

21.

Vlandas

(2021). The political economy of individual-level support for the basic income in Europe. Journal of European Social Policy, 31(1), 62–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/0958928720923596.

22.

Weinberg

J. D.

Freese

McElhattan

(2014). Comparing data characteristics and results of an online factorial survey between a population-based and a crowdsource-recruited sample. Sociological Science, 1(19), 292–310. https://doi.org/10.15195/v1.a19.

23.

Wood

B. D.

Jordan

(2017). Party polarization in America: The war over two social contracts. Cambridge University Press.

24.

Yeung

E. S. .F.

(2022). Can conservatives Be persuaded? Framing effects on support for universal basic income in the US (pp. 1–27). Political Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11109-022-09824-z.

25.

Zaller

J. R.

(1992). The nature and origins of mass opinion. Cambridge University Press.