Towards a Fractured Global Order? Deglobalization Dynamics and the Distributional Conflict between Globalists and Nationalists (DEGLOBALIZE)

The early 21st century shows signs that the era of ever-increasing globalization may be coming to an end. Political movements advocating deglobalization in economic, social, and political terms are gaining ground in many democracies and have already acquired positions of power in some of them. Understanding the underlying deglobalization dynamics is an important task for the social sciences. This project will tackle this task with a microfoundational perspective on the distributional conflict between supporters and opponents of globalization. Focusing on the voter-elite nexus, it will examine how voter demands for deglobalization emerge, how they affect political elites in international policymaking, and how anti-globalist elites in power influence politics and voters. The core objective is a comprehensive understanding of the voter-elite interactions that give rise to deglobalization.

Both the project’s theoretical framework and its empirical strategy will break new ground by integrating macro- and micro-level approaches. Its theory will connect recent insights into the moral foundations of individuals’ political behavior, highlighting the tension between universalist and communitarian values, with research in international political economy on the societal effects of external globalization shocks. This theoretical synthesis generates new hypotheses about the deep-rooted sources of the clash between globalism and nationalism. Empirically, the project pursues a combination of studying real-world natural experiments with designing targeted survey-based experimental approaches. With an empirical focus on member states of the European Union (EU) and EU institutions, it will leverage local globalization shocks related to outsourcing, migration, EU-level redistribution and the election of anti-globalist politicians. Survey experiments will then target the affected regions to trace the individual-level mechanisms behind the observed deglobalization dynamics.