Abstract
Recent micro-level studies have suggested that globalization—in particular, economic globalization and trade with China—breeds political polarization and populism. This study examines whether or not those results generalize by examining the country-level association between vote shares for European populist parties and economic globalization. Using data on vote shares for 267 right-wing and left-wing populist parties in 33 European countries during 1980–2017, and globalization data from the KOF institute, we find no evidence of a positive association between (economic or other types of) globalization and populism. EU membership is associated with a 4–6-percentage-point larger vote share for right-wing populist parties.
Highlights
I concur with the commonplace judgment that the rise of populism has been triggered by globalization and the consequent massive increase in inequality in many rich countries—Francis Fukuyama (2019)
While aggregating different aspects of globalization into one uni-dimensional measure can sometimes be informative, it is clear from the opening Fukuyama quote, as well as many of the recent studies on globalization and political outcomes, that trade and investment flows are the types of globalization that are thought to breed populism
The association between de facto economic globalization and the vote share of right-wing and left-wing populist parties is insignificant in our baseline; so are almost all different types of globalization in our robustness tests
Summary
I concur with the commonplace judgment that the rise of populism has been triggered by globalization and the consequent massive increase in inequality in many rich countries—Francis Fukuyama (2019). The same authors (Colantone and Stanig 2018a) showed that support for the Leave option in the Brexit referendum was larger in regions “hit harder” by economic globalization It is not obvious, that results driven by Chinese import shocks can be generalized to a positive association between country level (economic) globalization and votes for populist parties. If researchers anticipate publication bias, any field of scholarship is likely to suffer from production bias, in the sense that papers reporting statistically significant findings are more likely to be written, completed and submitted (what Rosenthal (1979) called the file drawer problem) Both mechanisms suggest that previously published findings may give a biased view of how globalization and populism are associated.
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