Survey Experiments in International Political Economy: What We (Don't) Know About the Backlash Against Globalization

Abstract

This article reviews the cumulation of evidence from survey experiments in the field of international political economy (IPE) and discusses their strengths and weaknesses in explaining the backlash against globalization. I first review the advancements made by the most commonly used survey experiment design in IPE, namely the Globalization-as-Treatment design, in which scholars randomly assign information about different features of globalization and solicit respondents’ attitudes toward protectionism. Then I discuss three issues with this design in addressing key puzzles in the emergence of globalization backlash: ( a) using a coarse informational treatment that stacks the deck against the economic self-interest hypothesis; ( b) overattributing globalization as a source of hardship; and ( c) neglecting heterogeneous room-to-maneuver beliefs across and within countries. The article suggests alternative designs and strategies to study these questions. Evidence from survey experiments suggests that much of the globalization backlash we witness today is deeply rooted in domestic politics.

The Backlash Against Globalization

“…A second major debate is more fundamental and revolves around the question whether the globalization backlash is predominantly driven by material or nonmaterial concerns (for reviews of this debate, see Golder 2016, Hainmueller & Hopkins 2014, Hobolt & De Vries 2016, Naoi 2020. The background to this debate is the fact that individual-level research is far less conclusive about the importance of economic transformations in driving the globalization backlash than the regionallevel analyses suggest.…”

“…Trying to adjudicate between these approaches is not the most fruitful endeavor, however, for two reasons. First, there are methodological issues: Whereas identity, values, beliefs, and subjective concerns are measured rather precisely on the individual level, identifying individuals' objective, respondent-specific material interest is much more difficult (Malhotra et al 2013, Naoi 2020, Owen & Walter 2017. This coarse measurement of self-interest makes it hard to adjudicate between the different approaches in a balanced manner.…”

What Do Voters Learn from Foreign News? Emulation, Backlash, and Public Support for Trade Agreements

“…We use the two well-established effects of trade in the field of International Economics as descriptors of the estimated effect of the Korea-China trade agreement: that trade liberalization increases national welfare (e.g., estimated 2% GDP growth) and that it creates winners and losers along a sectoral line (export-oriented industries benefit, and import-competing industries lose). We chose to use the prediction from a sectoral, Ricardo-Viner model over skill-based prediction as a treatment content, because our collection of newspaper articles reporting the conclusion of this trade agreement in Japan and Taiwan reveals that estimates and predictions along export-oriented vs. import-competing sectors dominate the reporting over the skill-based discussion (see Rho and Tomz 2017;Naoi 2020).…”

“…We demonstrate, in the domain of trade policy, it is not partisan or ideological identification of citizens but is instead, their predispositions about other countries being their "peers" that facilitates or blocks emulative preference formation. Finally, the field of international political economy has examined how educating citizens with information about well-established economic models, such as the Stolper-Samuelson theorem of international trade, can guide citizen preference formation along citizen self-economic interests (Hainmueller and Hiscox 2006;Rho and Tomz 2017;Naoi 2020). We show that peer reference is a critical component in learning and updating citizen briefs with the information about foreign government policy.…”

Backlash and Judicial Restraint: Evidence from the European Court of Human Rights

“…Liberal international institutions are increasingly challenged by consolidated democracies for being overly interventionist. While a growing literature considers the causes of backlash (Alter, Gathii and Helfer, 2016;Madsen, Cebulak and Wiebusch, 2018;Sandholtz, Bei and Caldwell, 2018;Hobolt, 2016;Walter, 2018;Abebe and Ginsburg, 2019;Copelovitch and Pevehouse, 2019;Naoi, 2020), we know less about how backlash affects institutional behavior. Do liberal institutions accommodate democratic critics by intervening less in the domestic affairs of democracies?…”