How Do People Think About Industrial Policy. Evidence from a Survey Experiment

One of the most significant developments in recent years has been the resurgence of interventionist industrial policy. Policymakers across the globe have begun to actively steer markets towards specific sectors and technologies, seeing this as part and parcel of staying economically competitive, successfully combatting climate change, and achieving resilience and autonomy in an increasingly geopolitical world. Despite this revival of industrial policy, a comprehensive understanding of how citizens think about it remains conspicuously absent. This gap is not only problematic from the point of view of democratic legitimacy, but it also prevents scholars and policymakers from understanding the emerging politicization of industrial policy and the ensuing financial constraints. In this paper, we address this gap with data from a novel survey on how citizens in several European countries reason about and navigate tradeoffs between different goals associated with industrial policy.