The Political Globalisation Trilemma Revisited: An Empirical Assessment Across Countries and Over Time

Abstract

The political hyperglobalisation trilemma asserts that a government cannot simultaneously opt for deep international integration, national sovereignty and democratic politics, but rather is constrained to choosing two of the three at most. This paper presents a new and comprehensive cross-country panel dataset operationalising the multifaceted three vertices of the trilemma. After an explorative data analysis, we employ panel error-correction techniques to uncover the mutual interdependencies among the variables in the system. The econometric evidence supports the existence of a long‐run relationship between economic integration, national sovereignty and democratic politics as postulated in the political globalisation trilemma.