Globalization and backlash: Polayni's revenge?

Abstract

This paper investigates political-economic backlash to economic globalization in industrialized polities. It analyzes data on the content of party platforms to develop measures of party support for, or opposition to, political-economic closure, anti-democratic nationalism, and xenophobia in all party platforms of 23 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries for all national elections between 1960 and 2003. These allow broader judgments of trends in autarky and autarchy than focusing on electoral success of particular extreme-right parties. Based on these measures, the paper quantitatively analyzes how international trade and capital openness and flows, and immigration flows, all influence the embrace or rejection of political-economic backlash among parties. The main explanatory finding is that immigration and capital flows and openness tend to increase marginally such backlash when national welfare compensation is very modest, but to reduce it when national compensation is generous, cushioning citizens from globalization's economic risks. This finding provides evidence that the current wave of globalization only marginally resembles the dark politics ending its nineteenth-century predecessor, and that welfare protection may help make the difference between political-economic backlash and liberalism in contemporary globalization.