Embedded liberalism or embedded nationalism? How welfare states affect anti-globalisation nationalism in party platforms

Abstract

In industrialised democracies, welfare state provisions have offsetting implications for anti-globalisation nationalism, central to the position taking of populist radical-right parties. On the one hand, social protection has an ‘embedded liberalism’ effect, mitigating economic insecurities associated with globalisation and thereby dampening anti-globalisation nationalism. On the other hand, social protection has an ‘embedded nationalism’ effect, awakening worries that globalisation may undermine hard-won provisions, thereby deepening anti-globalisation. This paper argues and finds evidence that which of these dynamics predominates depends on the particular kind of anti-globalisation debated and on the particular party family doing the debating. Welfare effort does generally dampen anti-globalisation nationalism, but it can deepen more than dampen anti-globalisation with respect to immigration and EU-integration that more directly impact existing national welfare provisions. Welfare effort can also deepen more than dampen anti-globalisation among radical-right and radical-left parties taking issue-ownership of anti-globalisation and of protecting national welfare-state competencies from global pressure.

Keywords:

• Anti-globalisation
• political parties
• radical right parties
• radical left parties
• welfare state
• embedded liberalism

Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented to seminars at the University of Amsterdam and to the Global Research in International Political Economy (GRIPE) series. For their criticisms and suggestions, we thank participants in these seminars, particularly Stephanie Rickard, Jeffry Frieden, James Vreeland and Layna Mosley. We also thank Philip Rathgeb and Marius Busemeyer for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The measure is based on coding of data from the Manifesto Project Database (MPD), discussed in detail below. The countries included for the Figure are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States. The party families, also discussed below, are Radical Left, Social Democratic, Liberal, Christian Democratic, Conservative, Radical Right, and Other (miscellaneous).

2 See Appendix 1 for a full description of these four measures.

3 For instance, the Chapel Hill Election Survey (CHES) and the MPD-based Parties’ Immigration and Integration Positions Dataset (PImPo) cover only the period starting in 1999. We do, however, replicate our baseline results using both databases in our robustness tests.

4 For instance, country-year averages of our key encompassing measures of party positioning – Anti-globalization Nationalism (broad) and Anti-globalization Nationalism (narrow) – tend be associated significantly and negatively with an encompassing measure of actual policy: the KOF Index of De Jure Political and Economic Globalization. See Table A1.1 in Appendix 1 for a summary of these results.

5 This contrasts the image of rising dispersion suggested by Figure 1, reflecting its focus on the main party families. That highlighted the increasing anti-globalization nationalism of radical right parties relative to other party families.

6 This snapshot excludes, hence, miscellaneous parties not in these key party families.

7 For the party-family coding of parties, see the MPD codebook: https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/down/data/2020b/codebooks/codebook_MPDataset_MPDS2020b.pdf.

8 For the list of parties so-coded, see: https://populistorg.files.wordpress.com/2020/02/01-thepopulist.pdf.

9 In robustness tests we replicate the baseline results using other specifications of welfare spending, for instance spending per head of the population or as a share of the unemployed.

10 The negative associations we see for these latter measures of anti-globalization nationalism are not appreciably changed should we focus on the same 12 European polities as for the anti-immigration estimation.

11 This pattern, incidentally, also applies modestly even to a measure of anti-globalization nationalism that combines our anti-globalization and anti-immigration measures, available for 12 countries (see Appendix 4).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian Burgoon

Brian Burgoon is Professor of International and Comparative Political Economy in the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) and Department of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. His research has appeared in many political science, international relations and economics journals. [[email protected]]

Wouter Schakel

Wouter Schakel is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR) and Departments of Political Science and Sociology, University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on the political economy of democratic representation. His research has appeared in journals like Socio-Economic Review, European Journal of Political Research, and Politics & Society. [[email protected]]