Globalization and populism in Europe
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Globalization and populism in Europe Andreas Bergh1,2 · Anders Kärnä2,3 Received: 18 February 2020 / Accepted: 22 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Globalization · Populism · Trade JEL Classification P16 · F68
1 Introduction 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). Populist parties are on the rise in western democracies. Several studies provide some support for the view (expressed by Fukuyama quoted above) that economic globalization is one of the most important causes—but the evidence is not conclusive. For Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1112 7-020-00857-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Andreas Bergh [email protected] Anders Kärnä [email protected] 1
Lund University, Lund, Sweden
2
The Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN), Box 55665, 102 15 Stockholm, Sweden
3
Örebro University, Örebro, Sweden
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Public Choice
example, Swank and Betz (2003) studied 16 European countries from 1981 to 1998, and documented a positive association between economic openness and votes for right-wing populist parties where social spending is low, but a negative association where social spending is high. More recently, Autor et al. (2020) showed show that congressional districts exposed to larger increases in import penetration disproportionately removed moderate representatives from office, replacing them with more extreme candidates. Dippel et al. (2015) showed that trade integration with China and Eastern Europe increases support for extreme-right parties in Germany, identifying changes in manufacturing employment as a mechanism. Similar results for 15 Western European countries were presented by Colantone and Stanig (2018b), who showed that Chinese import shocks have strengthened support for nationalist and isolationist parties. In a related paper, the same authors (Colantone and Stanig 2018a) also showed that support for the Leave option in the Brexit referendum was larger in regions “hit harder” by economic globalization. It is not obvious, however, that results driven by Chinese
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