Beyond Seattle: Globalization and Public Opinion

Abstract

The Open Economy and Its Enemies: Public Attitudes in East Asia and Eastern Europe. By Jane Duckett, William L. Miller Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 284 pp., $85.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-521-86406-0), $34.99 paper (ISBN: 0-521-68255-8). Globalization—in its various forms—remains a much studied topic in international and comparative political economy. However, despite the likelihood of wide ranging effects brought about by the integration of goods, peoples, and ideas, scholarly attention has been limited, surprisingly, to but a few of globalization's potential consequences. Most attention has been given to questions of whether greater market integration matters for domestic policy outcomes, with “outcomes” defined in terms of public spending and the health of the national economy. Far fewer studies consider the influence of openness on the health of representative democracy. Moreover, those extant studies that examine the economic impact of globalization focus primarily on developed welfare states—that is, on those economies that are best equipped to cushion the volatile effects of opening up (see, for example, Scheve and Slaughter 2001). Very little is known about what is arguably a far more critical question: the degree of public support for globalization in lower- and middle-income democracies. In this regard, Jane Duckett and William Miller's The Open Economy and Its Enemies fills a large hole in the globalization literature. Based on an exhaustive data collection effort aimed at assessing mass and elite attitudes in two “newer democracies” (the Czech Republic and South Korea) and two “semi-democracies” (Ukraine and Vietnam), the book easily offers the most comprehensive account to date of attitudes toward the world capitalist economy in lesser-developed countries. To sift through the many issues surrounding attitudes toward economic and cultural openness, Duckett and Miller conducted a series of focus group studies (involving 130 participants in all) and representative surveys of mass publics and public officials (totaling over ten thousand interviews) in these four countries during 2002 and 2003. The utility of Duckett and Miller's approach …