The Politics of (Anti-)Globalization: What do We Learn from Simple Models?

Abstract

Our focus is a preliminary investigation of the link between democratic politics and the stability of globalization in three steps. First, we briefly develop two key distinctions that provide an analytical framework for our discussion. Specifically, we argue that most of the literature on political economy of trade and immigration fails to distinguish between the average level of a policy (say, a tariff) and the variance of that policy (e.g. the dispersion of the tariff across sectors), and we will distinguish between two very broad classes of political economy model (Weberian models and interest group models). Second, we will consider how well these models account for policy outcomes (both mean and variance) in trade and immigration policies. We conclude that the pattern of successes and failures is difficult to account for within any of the standard political economy frameworks. This will lead us to the third part of the paper in which we propose what, for want of a better label, we call the social values extension of both the Weberian and interest group models.