The constraints on democratic governments imposed by globalization have been an important issue in international political economy for some years. The essence of the debate is whether globalization constrains or facilitates democratic politics and policymaking more generally. Pessimists suggest that to attract capital investment,national policies must converge on a neoliberal mixture of policies in which restrictions are placed on public spending and welfare, eventually producing a race to the bottom in social protections. Optimists argue that national policies, particularly in relation to welfare, are not overly constrained by globalization and provide considerable scope for national governments to pursue divergent courses of action.
These debates are dominated by analyses of macroeconomic, social, and institutional variables and neglect the role of individual citizens, even though they are the ultimate arbiters of policymaking in the advanced democracies. In Globalization and Mass Politics, Timothy Hellwig introduces mass politics into this discussion by focusing on the preferences and behavior of citizens and their elected representatives. He convincingly argues that these actors have an important role to play and that issues relating to democratic accountability and representative democracy have been glossed over in this literature. His approach amounts to “bringing the citizen back in” to debates about globalization and its consequences.
Hellwig’s key argument is that globalization reshapes the incentives of citizens and elected representatives by weakening the ability of governments to manage the economy and therefore restricting their “room to maneuver.” As he puts it:“[G]lobalization narrows the range of what is possible” (p. 14). In this situation, political leaders are faced with the prospect that their representative role is weakened and that electorates are likely to become discontented with them if they are increasingly unable to respond to voter concerns. Hellwig suggests that this does not happen in practice since “voters respond to signals from the world economy by demanding less in areas where constrained governments can no longer deliver but more where they still can” (p. 17). Thus, the cognitive dissonance created by the narrowing of domestic freedom of action on the economy is solved by voters lowering their expectations of what can be done. They do not demand less of their governments, but they do demand less in relation to the economy, which is subject to these constraints, and more in relation to other policies such as health and welfare, which are not constrained in the same way.
The author’s analysis traces the causal chain of electoral accountability by examining both the “demand-side,” that is, what voters want, along with the “supply-side”—what parties and political leaders offer to the electorate. The book looks at public demands for government action, the electoral sanctioning of politicians, channels of influence between the mass and the elites, and the behavior of political parties. So it is a comprehensive approach to this issue. His extensive empirical analysis is based on data from the International Social Survey Programme from 1986 to 2006, the European Election Study of 2009, and his own datasets, which are derived from opinion surveys in 10 countries.
Hellwig’s findings suggest that “signals from the world economy reduce voter tendencies to credit or blame their governments for the economy—a finding which raises questions about the applicability of economic voting in a globalized setting” (p. 17). Needless to say, this is the most controversial claim in the book, since it implies that economic voting models are unstable both across countries and over time. If the analysis is correct, then coefficients in vote models should be weak to begin with in very open economies, and should decline in strength over time as globalization becomes more important.
There has been a lively debate on this question in the economic voting literature, with one group of researchers claiming that economic voting models are unstable, partly because economic judgments are endogenous to partisanship (Anderson Reference Anderson2007; Evans and Anderson, Reference Evans and Anderson2006), and another group arguing that this is not the case. Paolo Bellucci and Mike Lewis-Beck(Reference Bellucci and Lewis-Beck2011), in particular, have shown that improvements in model specification, sample sizes, and measurement demonstrate that the economy has strong and stable effects on voting in six countries over time, including the United States and Britain (see also Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, and Elias, Reference Lewis-Beck, Nadeau and Elias2008; Lewis-Beck, Nadeau, and Foucault, Reference Lewis-Beck, Nadeau and Foucault2012).
More recently, time-series modeling in Britain over the entire New Labour period from 1997 to 2010 shows that economic evaluations interact with partisanship to influence vote intentions, but this does not reduce their impact on the vote, which remained strong over this 13-year period (Whiteley et al., Reference Whiteley, Clarke, Sanders and Stewart2015). Britain is a much more open economy than the United States, and yet there is no evidence to suggest that economic voting is weak or is declining in importance over time. Indeed, the surprise Conservative victory in the 2015 general election can be attributed almost entirely to the country’s economy recovering from the Great Recession (Clarke et al. Reference Clarke, Kellner, Twyman, Stewart and Whiteley2015).
Given these observations, why does Hellwig find that voters and governments reorient their preferences away from the economy and toward what he calls “non-economic issues” in open economies? There are both theoretical and methodological problems with his analysis that call into question these results. The theoretical question is: Why should losers from globalization accept it when the policy analysis literature suggests that intense losers are much more likely to mobilize against policies they dislike than diffuse winners are to support such policies? An alternative strategy for voters is to challenge globalization as a policy, rather than to just accept it. In fact, the rise of Euroskepticism and increased support for radical-right parties in Europe is one illustration of an electoral backlash against globalization.
The methodological issues relate to the measurement of the concepts in the analysis. Hellwig points out that “a Washington Post poll found that 43 per cent of Americans admitted that they did not understand the meaning of ‘globalization of the world economy’” (p. 21). Yet much of the analysis, which focuses on the attributions of responsibility for economic conditions, uses the question asked in 10 countries: “Which do you feel is most responsible for economic conditions in [country] in the past few years?” Response categories differed among countries—a result that itself creates framing biases—but they all included the category “the ups and downs in the world economy” (p. 70) as a response. This is used to determine changing attributions of responsibility at the global level. This question may be easier to understand than the one about globalization, but it is no easier to answer for the average citizen.We might expect it to pick up a lot of “non-attitudes” among respondents.
A second problem relates to the distinction between economic and noneconomic issues. This is investigatedwith data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP)Role of Government survey conducted in a large number of countries in 2008. A battery of questions asked respondents to indicate the extent to which they thought that government should be responsible for delivering policies in 10 different areas, including reducing unemployment, controlling inflation, providing income support for the elderly, and public housing. The problem is that the principal components analysis designed to separate these items shows significant overlap, with housing provision and student aid making a significant contribution to both factors. Since they both involve public spending, it is rather misleading to describe them simultaneously as “economic” and “non-economic.” Similarly, healthcare is the most salient issue in the non-economic scale, but this is largely about governments providing resources in most countries. If economic room for maneuver is constrained by globalization, so is spending on health, housing, and income support for the elderly. The distinction between these two is blurred and therefore difficult to model.
The third problem concerns respondent attributions of responsibility, which is an important part of the “reward—punishment” model of economic voting. Hellwig points out that the German economy was in the doldrums in 2009, yet the incumbent coalition government led by Chancellor Angela Merkel was nonetheless reelected, even though a simple reward-punishment model would predict otherwise. However, the reward—punishment model is more nuanced than his interpretation suggests. It argues that voters will reward an incumbent for a good performance and punish it for a weak performance, conditional on the alternatives available. In the 2009 German elections, the main rival party, the Social Democratic Party (SPD), had been in a grand coalition with the governing parties immediately prior to the election. For that reason, it did not benefit from the economic downturn, because it was seen as part of the problem rather than the solution. In contrast, as is well known, Barack Obama’s victory in the U.S. presidential election of 2008 was greatly assisted by the economic crash that occurred under George W. Bush.
Overall, Globalization and Mass Politics makes an interesting contribution to debates on globalization, and is welcome because it focuses on actors rather than aggregates when trying to explain its consequences. However, I remain unconvinced that economic voting is fading away and that electorates are meekly accepting that governments are unable to do much about economic policies in an ever-more-interdependent world.
