Voters Favor AI Over Offshoring, But Partisan Divides Are Growing

Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are reshaping labor markets and sparking political debates. Like economic globalization, AI promises benefits—job creation and lower prices—but also imposes costs such as job displacement. This research asks whether AI will trigger the same kinds of backlash as globalization by examining how people weigh the trade-offs between job outcomes and price changes.

🔎 How Opinions Were Measured

• A conjoint experiment with 6,000 respondents from the United States and Canada compared reactions to offshoring and generative AI.
• Scenarios varied multidimensional trade-offs between job changes (losses or gains) and price changes (higher or lower prices) to identify microfoundations of opinion formation.

📊 Key Findings

• Across all scenarios, respondents were equally or more sensitive to price changes than to employment shifts.
• Generative AI was preferred over offshoring overall, with this preference especially pronounced among Democrats in the United States.
• Republicans and Canadians exhibited more varied support for AI, demonstrating that AI adoption is not uniformly popular and can face opposition.
• The conjoint results highlight specific scenarios that are likely to trigger or temper protectionist stances.

⚖️ Political Implications

• An emerging partisan divide in the U.S. could shape future AI policy and regulation.
• Price effects—rather than employment effects alone—may be a key driver of public support or backlash toward technological and globalization policies.
• Understanding these micro-level trade-offs can help predict when AI will be politically acceptable and when it may provoke protectionist responses.

💡 Why It Matters

These findings clarify how voters balance economic benefits and costs from AI and globalization, revealing the conditions under which AI is likely to attract support or generate opposition across parties and countries.