Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure

By David H. Autor, David Dorn, Gordon H. Hanson, Kaveh Majlesi. The American Economic Review, 2020

991 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Has rising import competition contributed to the polarization of US politics? Analyzing multiple measures of political expression and results of congressional and presidential elections spanning the period 2000 through 2016, we find strong though not definitive evidence of an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the divisive 2016 US presidential election. Exploiting the exogenous component of rising import competition by China, we find that trade exposed electoral districts simultaneously exhibit growing ideological polarization in some domains, meaning expanding support for both strong-left and strong-right views, and pure rightward shifts in others. Specifically, trade-impacted commuting zones or districts saw an increasing market share for the Fox News channel (a rightward shift), stronger ideological polarization in campaign contributions (a polarized shift), and a relative rise in the likelihood of electing a Republican to Congress (a rightward shift). Trade-exposed counties with an initial majority White population became more likely to elect a GOP conservative, while trade-exposed counties with an initial majority-minority population became more likely to elect a liberal Democrat, where in both sets of counties, these gains came at the expense of moderate Democrats (a polarized shift). In presidential elections, counties with greater trade exposure shifted toward the Republican candidate (a rightward shift). These results broadly support an emerging political economy literature that connects adverse economic shocks to sharp ideological realignments that cleave along racial and ethnic lines and induce discrete shifts in political preferences and economic policy. (JEL D72, F14, J15, L82, R23)

Subfields: Demography, Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fecb985ed39b8237b84a31a1489b73955f130190

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Citations in the corpus

De-Globalisation? Global Value Chains in the Post-COVID-19 Age (2020, positive): “On the empirical front, Autor et al. (2020) and Colantone and Stanig (2018a) establish a causal link between the China (import competition) shock and (i) a rise of political polarization in the U.S., and (ii) an increase in support for nationalist and isolationist parties in 15 Western European…”
Did Austerity Cause Brexit? (2019, background): “A host of papers suggest that the distributional effects of globalization may causally explain the electoral success of populists (Autor et al., 2016; Colantone and Stanig, 2018; Dippel et al., 2015).”
Belief Disagreement and Portfolio Choice (2018, neutral): “4As in Pastor and Veronesi (forthcoming) and Autor et al. (2020). accurate measurement) is that we rule out the main channels through which the election may have differentially impacted individuals’ portfolio behavior other than through beliefs.”
Global Competition and Brexit (2018, neutral): “…success of incumbents (Hellwig and Samuels 2007; Kayser and Peress 2012); others have started looking at how globalization affects party and candidate choice (Autor et al. 2016; Che et al. 2016; Dippel, Gold, and Heblich 2015; Jensen, Quinn, and Weymouth 2016;Mughan,Bean, andMcAllister 2003).”
Why Does Globalization Fuel Populism? Economics, Culture, and the Rise of Right-wing Populism (2020, positive): “…shock by half between 2000 and 2014 would have produced a majority for the Democrats in 2016 (rather than a defeat) in the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan and would have swept Hillary Clinton to the Oval Office in lieu of Donald Trump (Autor et al. 2020, appendix).”
Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948-2020 (2021, background): “…role of various economic and sociocultural factors, including globalization and trade exposure (Malgouyres 2017; Colantone and Stanig 2018a, 2018b; Autor et al. 2020), economic insecurity and unemployment (Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch 2016; Algan et al. 2017; Becker, Fetzer, and Novy 2017;…”
Global crises and populism: the role of Eurozone institutions* (2019, methodology): “Finally, column (3) adds Sweden, the UK and Norway, with Western (3) being the corresponding dummy.”
Political Effects of the Internet and Social Media (2020, neutral): “2A nonexhaustive list of contributions: Algan et al. (2017); Autor et al. (2016, 2017); Dal Bó et al. (2018); Guiso et al. (2018); Dustmann et al. (2017); Colantone and Stanig (2018); Frey, Berger and Chen (2018); Fetzer (forthcoming); Gennaioli and Tabellini (2019).”
Populism in Place: The Economic Geography of the Globalization Backlash (2019, background): “(Feigenbaum and Hall 2015); and they were more likely to swing their votes toward Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election (Autor et al. 2016b).”
The Economic Origins of Authoritarian Values: Evidence From Local Trade Shocks in the United Kingdom (2021, background): “(2013) and a growing number of studies (Autor et al., 2016; Colantone & Stanig, 2018a; Dippel et al., 2015; Feigenbaum & Hall, 2015; Jensen et al., 2017; Pierce & Schott, 2016) that use the impact of China’s internal economic reforms on imports to the developed world as an exogenous economic shock t”
Positional deprivation and support for radical right and radical left parties* (2018, background): “There is also some evidence that exposure to globalization and trade spur electoral support for radical-left and, particularly, radical-right parties (Betz 1994; Swank and Betz 2003; Kriesi et al. 2008; Autor et al. 2016; Calantone and Stanig 2018).”