The Political Consequences of Offshoring

Firms’ increasing possibilities to offshore jobs have created new risks and new opportunities for workers. We analyze the political consequences of this development in advanced capitalist democracies. We argue that low-skilled individuals in easily offshoreable occupations face increasing labor market risks, whereas, highly educated individuals mainly benefit from the opportunities generated by the increasing possibility to organize production processes internationally. This affects workers’ policy and partisan preferences. Since job offshorability increases low-skilled workers’ demand for social protection, it increases their propensity to vote for leftist parties. In contrast, higher levels of job offshoreability increase liberal preferences among high-skilled workers, and as such their tendency to vote for market-liberal parties. The effect of offshoreability on preferences for right-wing populist parties is less clear. We test our argument with individual-level data from multiple waves of the European Social Survey for 25 countries and find evidence in favor of our hypotheses.