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Open for Politics? Globalization, Economic Growth, and Responsibility Attribution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2019

Nathan M. Jensen Open the ORCID record for Nathan M. Jensen [Opens in a new window]  and
Guillermo Rosas
Nathan M. Jensen
Affiliation:
Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA, e-mail: natemjensen@austin.utexas.edu
Guillermo Rosas
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA, e-mail: grosas@wustl.edu
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Abstract

Previous literature suggests that economic performance affects government approval asymmetrically, either because voters are quicker to blame incompetence than to credit ability (grievance asymmetry) or because they understand that the degree to which policy-makers can affect the economy varies depending on economic openness (clarity of responsibility asymmetry). We seek to understand whether these asymmetries coexist, arguing that these theories conjointly imply that globalization may have the capacity to mitigate blame for bad outcomes but should neither promote nor reduce credit to policy-makers for good economic outcomes. We look for evidence of these asymmetries in three survey experiments carried out in the USA and Canada in 2014 and 2015. We find ample experimental evidence in support of the grievance asymmetry, but our results are mixed on the impact of economic openness on blame mitigation, with some evidence of this phenomenon in the USA, but not in Canada.

Keywords

Credit claimingsurvey experimentpreregistrationglobalization
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Summer 2020 , pp. 89 - 100
Copyright
© The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2019

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Footnotes

*

Tim Hellwig, Ernest Calvo, and participants at conferences at the University of Maryland and the International Political Economy Society (2014) all provided feedback and advice on this project. Thanks to Syeda ShahBano Ijaz, Leo Yang, Gareth Nellis and participants at the UCSD Replication course. We thank the Weidenbaum Center on the Economy, Government, and Public Policy at Washington University in St. Louis for funding our US survey experiments and Thomas Carroll for excellent research assistance. The authors have no conflicts of interest. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DSZHIP

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