Gaetano Inglese, PhD Candidate

draft Green, J., Grant, Z., Evans, G., & Inglese, G. (2025). Linking artificial intelligence job exposure to expectations: Understanding AI losers, winners, and their political preferences. Research & Politics, 12(2).

PhD Papers

From Aspiration to Disillusion? The Political Consequences of AI-driven Employment Threats
Best Paper Prize, CIVICA EU Conference on Political Behaviour, CEU 2025
draft IBEI AI & Politics Workshop 2025 slides

Abstract

The expansion of higher education in knowledge economies has fostered the belief that investment in education brings economic rewards and enhances security. However, the fast-growing advancements in Artificial Intelligence are transforming highly skilled sectors, fueling perceptions of risk and uncertainty among highly educated workers. What are the political implications of this new trend? This paper examines whether AI-driven threats to graduates' employability erode their faith in the meritocratic system, leading to shifts in ideology and voting intentions. The paper builds on a dataset linking individual-level surveys and administrative data on online job vacancies in the United Kingdom with novel indices of occupational exposure to AI. Leveraging the introduction of ChatGPT in December 2022, the paper demonstrates how AI affects the employability of graduates across different fields of higher education. Negative shifts alter individuals' fairness beliefs, shift ideological self-placement to the left and drive anti-incumbent voting intentions. The study importantly underscores how AI is likely to influence the political views and behaviours of the highly educated, suggesting important and long-lasting political repercussions for knowledge economies.

Aspirational, Still? Local House Price Increases and Political Preferences
draft APSA 2025 slides

Abstract

Housing is a growing policy concern in advanced democracies. As prices surge, concerns about homeownership intensify, particularly among young renters who increasingly feel priced out of the housing market. Conventional wisdom holds that rising house prices increase economic conservatism and political support for the incumbent among homeowners, without affecting renters. This paper argues that the political responses of renters to housing booms depend on perceptions of future affordability. Focusing on the United Kingdom, the paper employs a shift-share instrument leveraging variation in local housing stock composition and regional price trends across property types to identify the causal effect of house price shifts. Using panel data and instrumental variable estimates, the paper finds that unanticipated increases in house prices strengthen pro-redistributive attitudes among renters, but also their cultural concerns against immigrants. Electorally, higher house prices increase support for the Labour Party. These findings highlight a deepening political cleavage between asset-owning homeowners and insecure renters, offering new insights into the political reverberations of the housing crisis in advanced capitalist democracies.

Unmet Expectations and Attitudes toward the Role of Government
draft EPSA 2024 slides

Abstract

From diminishing income returns to education to hiring freezes, young labour market entrants in advanced democracies are living through a period of economic insecurity. While growing up with the meritocratic belief that education ensures rewards, they are now ever more often witnessing a mismatch between their expectations and reality. Focusing on the United Kingdom, this paper examines the political effects of this trend. It argues that the gap between expectations formed during early adulthood and real outcomes across the life-cycle changes beliefs about the fairness of the market system, increasing demands for government intervention in the economy. Using 30 waves of the British Household Panel - Understanding Society panel dataset, the paper finds that unmet early income expectations are a stronger predictor of attitudes towards economic interventionism than real earnings. If such a gap is experienced during formative years, it may leave a lasting imprint. Moreover, it is stronger among those with higher education and from more privileged social class backgrounds. The paper contributes to the literature on redistribution preferences by shedding new light on the subjective mechanisms behind economic attitudes and unveiling the political implications of economic disappointment at a young age.

Other Projects

Economic Shocks and the Masculinity Threat
with Philipp Heyna and Djordje Milosav

Summary

The paper studies the causes of the gender gap in youth voting for the far-right in Western Europe. We examine whether young men frame economic insecurity as a masculinity threat, increasing radical-right support, while women are less likely to do so, using survey experiments and observational causal designs.

Graduate Teaching Assistant, LSE Government

GV264 Politics and Institutions in Europe
AY 2024–25, full unit; AY 2025–26, full unit.
GV251 Government, Politics and Public Policy of the European Union
AY 2024–25, full unit.

My research examines the political implications of economic insecurity in Western Europe. I investigate three central sources of insecurity: declining income returns to education, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and housing unaffordability. Using panel surveys and administrative data, I apply both observational and causal-inference methods to analyse how these experiences widen the gap between individual expectations and realised outcomes, fostering distrust in market institutions and detachment from mainstream politics. I show that young people are especially sensitive to a crisis in future expectations, suggesting long-term important implications for the future of European democracies.

I am an affiliate of Nuffield College (University of Oxford) and a Research Assistant at the Nuffield Politics Research Centre. I am also affiliated with the LSE Data Science Institute and serve as LSE representative to the European Graduate Network. In spring I will visit the University of Zurich, hosted by Thomas Kurer.

I hold a BSc in Political Science from the University of Pisa and an MA from the University of Florence, where I was an honours student at the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies and the Scuola Normale Superiore. I also hold an MSc in Comparative Politics from the LSE, funded by the Ermenegildo Zegna Founder’s Scholarship.
Previously, I was a Blue Book Trainee at the European Commission’s DG CNECT.
More details in my CV.

Gaetano Inglese

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PhD Papers

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Graduate Teaching Assistant, LSE Government

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