Paul Whiteley correctly identifies a chief motivation of Globalization and Mass Politics as the introduction of mass politics into debates on how globalization matters for democratic governments. As he notes, the book examines how economic globalization has reshaped citizen policy demands, voting behavior, representational linkages between masses and elites, and party behavior. Through all of these settings, I argue that globalization transforms politics in advanced democracies by weakening the effects of economic concerns and bolstering the salience of noneconomic considerations. A strength of the book, I submit, is its ability to evaluate the argument across the settings that constitute mass politics.
In his review, however, Whiteley focuses on but one implication of my general argument: its implications for economic voting. It is true that a good deal of work has examined the instability of economic voting effects across national contexts. And for this reason, it is worth considering if globalization accounts for some of this instability. Whiteley is not convinced that this is the case, maintaining that the economy matters. Yet to defend this position he references recent elections in two of the countries with the largest national markets: the United States and the United Kingdom. In smaller, more open economies, economic conditions matter less for elections. And globalization appears as one reason why.
To his credit, Whiteley does raise two concerns with respect to economic voting that, if correct, have implications for the book’s general argument. The first is something any study on the effects of a multifaceted phenomenon (like globalization) on individual attitudes must confront, namely: Do the masses fully appreciate the concept in question? I acknowledge that readers may be skeptical. However, the book reports several analyses that point to a decent correlation between popular assessments and reality. For example, citizens in globalized economies are more likely to see the world economy as responsible for national conditions. Perceptions of economic openness are similar in nature to what we know about perceptions of economic performance: While citizens may not be able to recite national balance-of-trade figures or current joblessness figures, their general assessments tend to align with objective conditions.
The second concern raised by Whiteley is the distinction between economic and noneconomic issues. Since the book reasons that citizens’ response to interdependence varies according to issue type, it is important to critique how issue types are classified. Heis critical of my use of items from ISSP surveys, noting that certain items show significant overlap across dimensions in the principal components analysis. Yet I address this very issue, asserting that it makes sense on face-validity grounds that housing provision and student aid be thought of in both economic and noneconomic terms. I further note that the labels “economic” and “noneconomic” are not hermetically sealed categories but “pertain to the general ways individuals view these two sets of issues” (p. 47). Moreover, the review reads as though the classification of ISSP items in Chapter 3 is the only way in which the study separates out two sets of issues. Subsequent chapters marshal diverse sets of data, on both masses and elites, to advance alternative ways of classifying performance and positional issues. In each case, this distinction is shown to matter for the way in which mass politics works in open economies.
