Speaker: Benedikt Marxer (University of Lucerne)
Title: Opposition to New Technologies: The Effects of Substitutes, Exposure, and Political Cues
Abstract: This paper studies why opposition to new technologies declines over time. We examine the automobile ban in the Swiss canton of Grisons, where voters repeatedly decided whether to maintain or lift restrictions in popular votes between 1907 and 1925. This unique setting provides municipal-level panel variation in political attitudes toward a transformative technology during its diffusion in the rest of the world. We combine archival data on popular votes with newspaper evidence and municipal characteristics. Our empirical strategy exploits three sources of variation: the staggered expansion of railways, which increased access to a substitute technology; road openings, which generated direct exposure to automobile use; and changes in cantonal executive and legislative representation, which created variation in exposure to political cues. Difference-in-differences and event-study estimates show that access to railways reduced support for automobiles, while exposure to pro-automobile political leaders increased it. Direct exposure to automobile use had little effect. Newspaper evidence shows that the debate shifted from concerns about local disturbances and costs for incumbent transport providers to concerns that restrictions caused the region to miss broader economic opportunities.
Maggie Hendrix
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