CAREER: Globalization, Stability, and Participation in Authoritarian Citizenship

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Economic globalization creates many conflicting interests for governments that host multi-national corporations. In democracies, governments often provide greater welfare and redistribution to compensate groups harmed by globalization’s impact. In non-democracies without well established interest group representation, however, much less is known about how globalization affects both government provision of welfare and protests driven by globalization-induced inequalities. This project seeks to understand when foreign investment in authoritarian countries increases government redistribution and how both international production chains and local government policies drive or deter protests. The findings of the project will help to better understand how authoritarian governments adapt to globalization and the international business environment faced by multinational corporations operating abroad. The project has two specific goals. The first goal is to identify the conditions under which economic globalization increases access to authoritarian redistribution. Using text-as-data techniques on government firm registration records and a representative survey of foreign-invested firms in a matching model for time-series cross-sectional data, the project disaggregates foreign direct investment to investigate the hypotheses that market orientation of foreign-funded firms drives the generosity of welfare redistribution through higher government spending, but skill-dependence of foreign firms determines who gains access to redistribution. The second goal is to identify the relationship between increased access to welfare redistribution and incidents of protest behavior. Using time-series cross-sectional models on social media and non-governmental organization reports on protests including labor and other non-state sanctioned protests, the project identifies not only how relative access to welfare redistribution relates to street protests, but also if expanded access to welfare decreases socio-economic unrest. The findings of the project will advance basic research on central questions relating to government policy responses to globalization, the relationship of globalization to social unrest, and the political economy of multi-national firms operating in authoritarian countries. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.