I am the principal investigator of the project DESPO "Deindustrializing Societies and the Political Consequences" which has been funded by the ERC as a starting grant (1.1 million EUR). The project will begin in February 2020 and run through 2025.
"Deindustrializing Societies and the Political Consequences"
Deindustrialization has inflicted collateral damage far beyond displaced manufacturing workers. It has also upended the lives of working-class families and driven formerly industrialized areas into deprivation, generating new political fault lines in society. The aim of this project is to reveal how a person’s individual, family, and local community experiences of manufacturing decline transform the way they participate in politics and their political attitudes over the course of their life. DESPO will focus on the long-term consequences by studying a rich time frame which spans five decades of manufacturing decline and its political aftermath (1965-2015). It will examine these effects on an exhaustive series of political attitudes and behaviours including: if and how people vote; what people believe and think about their political system; and how strongly people identify with political parties. The project will use large-scale administrative data to construct multi-dimensional measures of deindustrialization for small geographic units in a unique database that will be linked with individual and household longitudinal data.