How do welfare state contexts alter individuals' concerns regarding the threat of job automation in the "Industry 4.0"? Modern welfare states emerged as a response to managing the social disruptions of industrialisation in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Today, amidst the Fourth Industrial Revolution, they again play a significant role as automation threatens to reshape labour markets at a much more rapid pace than in any previous Industrial Revolution. I hence argue that welfare states which better insure citizens against large reductions in living standards due to unemployment significantly reduce concerns that automation could threaten their long-term job security and economic stability. By allowing more time for retraining instead of forcing individuals into precarious or lower-income work, generous welfare states may buffer otherwise disruptive political reactions to increased economic insecurity. This has significant implications: as automation risk moves up the skill ladder, affecting a growing and electorally highly relevant proportion of the middle class, welfare state generosity may become increasingly consequential for social cohesion and political stability. To test this hypothesis, I match household-level unemployment benefit data from 15 modern welfare states with three waves of attitudinal data from the OECD Risk That Matters survey, controlling with objective occupation-based measures of potential automation risk. The analysis covers over 40.000 respondents and variation in both benefit generosity and institutional design (earnings-related versus flat-rate). I find that in earnings-related benefit systems, higher benefit levels significantly reduce individuals' perception that automation threatens their economic security. Conversely, in flat-rate benefit systems, risk perceptions are generally significantly higher, particularly among higher earners where the potential loss of status is the greatest, even when objective measures predict a relatively low risk. This suggests that flat-rate systems fail to adequately reassure middle- and higher-income workers about their economic futures. The findings thus contribute to ongoing debates about the future of the welfare state in the Industry 4.0, suggesting that social policy choices made today will shape political stability and social cohesion in the decades ahead.
