Attitudes towards policy alternatives and economic change: conjoint experiments on policy options vis-à-vis automation and globalization

Abstract

This is a conjoint experiment, carried out by IPSOS on behalf of an international team based at INAPP (IT), at the University of Amsterdam (NL), of Gent (BE), of Konstanz (DE) and at the Politecnico of Torino (IT). The conjoint experiment aims at testing attitudes towards alternative schemes to balance or counter-act the effects of economic changes, such as automation and globalization. We model the different schemes as varying across seven dimensions. There are two conjoint experiments: one on globalization and one on automation. These are introduced with nearly identical introductory texts. The dimensions are also nearly identical, with minor linguistic differences contained to the term “globalization” or “automation”, when relevant. The survey is carried out in 8 countries: IT, NL, UK, DE, PL, SE, USA and JAP. The countries have been selected to ensure variation in (1) welfare state models and industrial structure, (2) economic performance in the past 10 years (3) geographical location. A pre-test of the experiment has been carried out in July on a sample of 420 individuals. The full survey includes 2500 respondents in each country. The survey is administered through IPSOS’ online platform. While IPSOS panels are already quite representative of the population of each country, we further strengthen the representativeness of the sample by setting hard and soft quotas on 6 different indicators. At the moment of this pre-registration, data collection is completed by IPSOS, but data are embargoed and no-one in the research team has had any access to them in any form. The downloadable file contains the full text of the pre-registration, including details of the dimensions, of the sample, as well as the full list of pre-registered hypotheses and expectations.