Rusted Politics: How Citizens Attribute Blame for Deindustrialization

The decline of industrial work due to offshoring, automation, and service sector rise has given rise to post-industrial society, yet many citizens have grievances about these sectoral changes. Deindustrialization has upended the Keynesian premise whereby common people could find local industrial work and support their family with a basic wage. In this study, I seek to understand how citizens convert these grievances into blame and how it is attributed across different levels of politics: local, national or supra-national (EU). I report on the results of an original survey conducted in the United Kingdom, France, and Italy (n=3500). The results show that citizen grievances spread beyond displaced workers and left-behind places. Even more affluent voters still prefer the supply of industrial jobs in the economy. Blame attribution varies with political and class orientation, revealing that industrial work continues to structure class-based political cleavages in post-industrial societies.