Globalization and nationalism

This chapter illustrates the results obtained in Colantone and Stanig (2018ab) on the political effects of globalization. In particular, in Colantone and Stanig (2018a) we investigate the effects of exposure to the Chinese import shock on support for nationalist and radical-right parties across fifteen western European countries, between the beginning of the 1990s and 2007. In Colantone and Stanig (2018b) we focus on the implications of the same shock on support for the Leave option in the Brexit referendum of 2016. In both cases, we find positive and significant effects of exposure to the China shock on the voting outcomes, both when working with district-level election returns, and when focusing on individual- level voting data. Overall, our results suggest that globalization is a facet of structural change that has significant political effects, tilting the electorates in a nationalist, isolationist, and radical-right direction.