Henning Finseraas’s research while affiliated with Norwegian University of Science and Technology and other places

We examine long‐run effects of automation risk on turnout. We expect gendered negative effects because men's turnout is more sensitive to job loss and earnings, but negative effects might be offset by populist right‐wing mobilization on economic grievances. We rely on population‐wide administrative data to avoid well‐known biases in survey data. We find both men and women with high automation risk to suffer in the labour market, but automation risk is associated with lower turnout for men only. The negative association with turnout is weaker where the populist right is stronger, consistent with mobilization on economic grievances. Finally, we show experimentally that priming of automation risk produces null findings, suggesting that risks need to have material consequences to affect political behaviour. Our findings imply that technological change has contributed to the emergence of gender gaps in turnout and populist voting as well as the participation drop among the working class.

Recent scholarship claims that group grievances due to political exclusion and discrimination drive civil wars. The grievance perspective suggests that socio-psychological factors allow groups to overcome collective action problems. We argue that the grievance perspective (over)focuses on the ends and not means , which are critical to explain how groups survive state sanction, allowing contention to escalate to civil war. We suggest that inclusive economic governance reduces investment in state-evading infrastructures for quotidian economic reasons, leading to the buildup of rebellion-specific capital. Physical and human infrastructures of state evasion form the logistical bases for survival against state sanction. Our analyses show that group-grievance-generating political factors are poorer predictors of civil war compared with economic freedoms measured as free-market friendly policies and the private ownership of economies, which should reduce economic rents accruing to state-evading shadow markets. Our results are robust to several alternative models, data, and estimating method. Theory that ignores the means explain the main causes of costly violence only partially, or mistake symptom for cause. Freedom and inclusiveness, which should reduce grievances, are intrinsically valuable, but they are hard to obtain when violence is waged successfully for more narrower ends.

Technological change often increases demand for high-skilled jobs, with low-skilled losers turning to the populist right in response. The political effects of technological change that increases demand for low-skilled workers are largely unknown. The growth of the salmon fish-farming industry in rural Norway improved the labor-market situation for low-skilled workers, and we find that support for the populist right-wing party increased in municipalities that benefitted from the industry growth. The electoral change is due to a right-wing shift on the economic, but not the cultural dimension. Our results support political economy frameworks that point to lower demand for state interventions after positive labor market shocks, but raise the question of in what contexts support for populism will decline.

Sammendrag [English abstract below] Kan folks moralske intuisjoner bidra til å forstå politiske og ideologiske orienteringer i befolkningen? Vi presenterer teorien om moralske intuisjoner (Moral Foundations Theory, MFT) og gjør den første studien av MFTs forklaringskraft i en norsk kontekst. Vi tester validiteten av en norsk oversettelse av spørreskjemaet «Moral Foundations Questionnaire», det sentrale surveyinstrumentet for å måle moralske intuisjoner, og finner støtte for en fem-faktormodell som beskriver et tydelig skille mellom moralsk universalisme (omsorg og rettferdighet) og moralsk partikularisme (inngruppelojalitet, autoritet og hellighet). Vi undersøker videre hvordan disse moralske konfigurasjonene er korrelert med plassering på venstre-høyre-skalaen, parti-og partilederpreferanser og syn på sentrale politiske spørsmål som skatt og innvandring. Vi finner, i likhet med tidligere forskning fra andre land, at venstreorienterte skårer høyt på moralsk universalisme og lavt på partikularisme, mens høyreorienterte i større grad likestiller universalistiske og partikularistiske intuisjoner. Moralske intuisjoner forklarer en større andel av variasjonen i politisk orientering og holdning til skatte-og innvandringspolitikk enn utdannelse, noe som tilsier at teorien kan vaere nyttig for å belyse politisk atferd. Nøkkelord Moralske intuisjoner, Moral Foundations Theory (MFT), politiske holdninger, ideologi, universalisme/partikularisme Abstract Can individual's moral intuitions shed light on political and ideological orientations in the population? We present Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and conduct the first study of MFT's explanatory power in a Norwegian context. We test the validity of a Norwegian translation of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire, the central survey instrument for measuring moral foundations, and find support for a five-factor model that also describes a clear divide between moral universalism (care and fairness) and moral particularism (ingroup loyalty, authority, and sanctity). We further examine how these moral configurations relate to political left-right orientation, party and party-leadership preferences, and views on key political issues such as tax and immigration. We find, like previous research from other countries, that people with a left-wing orientation are high on moral universalism and low on particularism, while those with a right-wing orientation equate universalist and particularist intuitions to a greater extent. Moral foundations explain more of the variation in political orientation than education, indicating that the theory can shed useful light on political behavior.