Presentation on "Globalization's Losers"

In the department today, Yotam Margalit presented some results from his study on "Globalization's Losers: Trade, Culture and the Politics of Discontent." (Abstract of his research is here.) He was looking at the chain linking socio-economic attributes, negative attitudes toward globalization and integrationist policies, and then voting for right or left parties. The data that he presented suggested that predictions from the ol' Heckscher-Ohlin model do seem to conform to reality if we relate the model to income levels, assuming that owners of relatively scarce factors (conditional on economic openness) correspond to the poor in developed countries and the middle-class or rich in developing countries. But the predictions do not fare well when we relate the model to the ideological leanings of voters and parties, assuming that protectionism should be the cause of the left in developed countries and the right in developing countries. The latter prediction---specifically, that antiglobalization forces should be decidely on the left in developed countries---is not borne out by the data. Why? Margalit claims that there is a second dimension, one that he calls "perception of cultural threat," which intervenes. Antiglobalization forces, it seems, are animated by leftist economic concerns but rightist "cultural concerns." When you put the two together, you get antiglobalization voters and parties that are all over the single-dimensional ideological spectrum. When you permit parties and voters to locate themselves freely in a two-dimensional ideological space, something that proportional representation comes close to allowing, you get clustering in the "cultural right, economic left" region of the two-dimensional space.

Margalit's analysis leads us to conclude that what he labels as "cultural concerns" disrupt what otherwise would be a clean mapping between economic interests and political expression of dislike for globalization. But we are left to ponder, what exactly are these "cultural concerns"? Are they really just idiosyncratic, country-specific factors---some kind of error term---that must be studied on a case by case basis? Such was the way that Margalit responded to questions about what the cultural factors were. Does that make sense? Or are there systematic forces---racism? religion? generic fear of change?---at work here?