The Politics of AI

Nicholas Bloom and Christos Makridis

No 34813, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Using new data from the Gallup Workforce Panel, we document a persistent partisan gap in self-reported AI use at work: Democrats are consistently more likely than Republicans to report frequent use. In 2025:Q4, for example, 27.8% of Democrats report using AI weekly or daily, compared with 22.5% of Republicans. Democrats also report deeper task-level integration, using AI in 16% more work activities than Republicans. Consistent with this, Democrats are employed in occupations with higher predicted AI exposure based on task-content measures and report larger perceived differences in AI-related job displacement risk. However, in regression models the partisan gap in AI use disappears once we control for education, industry, and occupation, indicating that observed differences primarily reflect compositional variation rather than political affiliation per se.

JEL-codes: J0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
Note: IO LS POL PR
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