Mass Media and the Domestic Politics of Economic Globalization

Abstract: Much is known about the domestic politics of globalization but political scientists have largely ignored one critical link between the international economy and many individuals around the world: mass media. Considering the likely effects of mass media on public perceptions of responsibility, this article develops an argument about the effects of mass media on individuals' blame attributions for the adjustment costs of economic globalization. The article then develops a simple formal model of how these effects on blame attributions affect the incentives of policymakers, illustrating that mass media undermine the political pressures which have traditionally required policymakers to compensate domestic groups harmed by globalization. Individual-level implications of the theory are tested on survey data from France in 1992-1993 and state-level implications are tested on data from most countries around the world from 1960 to 2010. The evidence shows that mass media diffuse the political backlash from groups harmed by globalization, leading to weakened welfare-state responsiveness. A key implication is that this article provides novel empirical evidence of the socially-constructed nature of international politics and contributes to bridging the divide between rationalism and constructivism in international relations research.