EXPLAINING THE BACKLASH AGAINST GLOBALIZATION: THE DISTRIBUTIVE CONSEQUENCES OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ENGAGEMENT, IDENTITY, AND GLOBALIZATION ATTITUDES IN THE UNITED STATES

My dissertation examines how politicians' incentives for political survival and the distributive consequences of economic integration incite protectionist sentiments. The causes of protectionism have been the subject of intense debate in political economy literature. Current studies organize in two major camps. On the one hand, scholars investigating the effect of regional economic shocks emphasize the economic roots of this backlash. They argue that the negative distributive consequences of foreign economic flows galvanize right-wing politics and deepened ideological divisions between parties. On the other hand, research on mass attitudes emphasizes the importance of socio-cultural values driving protectionism. These individual-level studies rely on surveys to demonstrate that material self-interest fails to correlate with protectionist attitudes. The existing accounts fail to provide a consistent theory of globalization attitudes because they ignore the role of politicians. I advance a new theory that revisits how we think about trade preference formation by focusing on politicians' electoral strategies.

My dissertation is composed of three papers that explore the effect of global economic integration on American political life by focusing on elite rhetoric on economic globalization. It has three important findings: i) politicians target white voters with anti-trade ads in racially diverse places with high exposure to job losses from trade competition ii) anti-trade ads fuel protectionist sentiments iii) the creation of new local jobs as a result of foreign direct investment (FDI) decreases out-group animosity toward foreign competitors. My findings contribute to the major debates in mass attitudes toward trade literature by showing that sociotropic and ethnocentric sources of trade preferences are endogenous to the economic context. They also break away from a "bottom-up" theory of trade preference formation, which emphasizes individual characteristics, and affirm a "top-down" approach that pays attention to the interaction of economic and non-economic factors during the politicization of trade by elites.