A clear link exists between labor market insecurity and anti-globalization attitudes: heightened insecurity predicts more protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist sentiment.

🛠️ How exposure and immobility were measured

• A novel measure of labor market insecurity combines two components:
• industry-based exposure to import competition; and
• an occupation-based measure of job immobility, which captures how similar an individual's job is to other jobs in the economy, with similarity weighted by those jobs' prevalence.

🔎 What the measure reveals

• Individuals whose jobs are more dissimilar from others in their industry or state face greater anxiety about their labor market prospects when globalization shocks occur.
• Those with higher combined exposure and immobility are more likely to express anti-globalization sentiment, including protectionist, xenophobic, and isolationist views.

📌 Key findings (at a glance)

• Labor market insecurity is multidimensional: exposure to import competition alone is incomplete without accounting for occupational immobility.
• Occupational immobility is operationalized as job dissimilarity weighted by prevalence across the economy.
• The interaction of exposure and immobility identifies individuals most prone to oppose globalization.

💡 Why it matters

• These results connect detailed labor-market structure to political attitudes about trade and immigration, showing that the capacity to move between jobs shapes public responses to globalization shocks and, by extension, political demands for protectionist policies.