Artificial Intelligence at Work: Political Implications

This paper investigates the political consequences of AI adoption at the workplace by linking respondents from the Swiss Household Panel to the universe of online job advertisements posted by their employers between 2015 and 2025. We use recent advances in natural language processing to extract references to AI applications in firms’ job ads, identify the tasks these applications are designed to perform or replace, and match them to task profiles from the O*NET database. This allows us to construct a measure of workers’ task exposure to AI that varies across firms, occupations, and over time. We then examine how within-worker variation in AI exposure is associated with changes in political preferences, political participation and voting behavior. By capturing firm-level technological change, our approach offers a more granular and realistic perspective on the political implications of automation, grounded in the actual workplace dynamics that shape how workers respond to technology exposure.