Coordinator: Anne Marie Therese Jeannet
Funding institution: European Research Council
Call / programme: ERC-2019- STG
Project dates: 02/20-04/26
Funding amount: €1.100.000
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.