From Tiananmen to Outsourcing: the Effect of Rising Import Competition on Congressional Voting Towards China

Importing Political Polarization? The Electoral Consequences of Rising Trade Exposure

“…6 Specifically on the impact of import competition from China, Feigenbaum and Hall (2015) find that in the 1990s and 2000s, average support for protectionist trade bills is stronger among politicians whose districts experience larger increases in trade exposure. Similarly, Kleinberg and Fordham (2013) and Kuk et al (2015) find that representatives from congressional districts harder hit by the China trade shock are more likely to support foreign-policy legislation that takes a hard line against China. Because this literature studies cross-sectional rather than over-time variation in legislative voting across districts, it does not address whether these economic shocks have induced changes in political outcomes.…”

“…The movement away from the political center seen in Table 4 reflects the much-discussed demise of congressional moderates (e.g., Layman et al, 2006). Table 5 examines the fortunes of centrists directly.…”

Survey Experiments in International Political Economy: What We (Don't) Know About the Backlash Against Globalization

“…"Leave" votes in the Brexit referendum were also concentrated in districts with voters with lower educational attainment, lower income, higher unemployment rates, and a historical dependency on manufacturing employment (Becker et al 2017, Colantone & Stanig 2018. Although these studies consider diverse economic origins of this hardship-e.g., import shock from China (Autor et al 2013, Kuk et al 2018, companies outsourcing jobs abroad (Rickard 2018), exogenous exchange rate shock (Ahlquist et al 2020), or the Great Recession (Mansfield et al 2016)-economic hardship nonetheless plays a primary role in explaining the shift in public and elite opinion toward protectionism. Beyond explaining protectionist sentiments and policies, furthermore, studies have attributed the rise of xenophobia, racism, support for extreme right-wing parties, and the rise in authoritarian values to economic hardship (Ballard-Rosa et al 2017).…”

Getting Tough on China: Are Campaign Ads a Signal of Future Policy or Just Cheap Talk?

“…Scholars have documented the influence of ethnocentric sentiment (Kam and Kinder 2007) and outgroup bias in driving fears about job insecurity (Mansfield and Mutz 2009), offshoring (Margalit 2011), and immigration (Banks 2016; Valentino, Brader, and Jardina 2013). Others have found an association between job losses or import competition attributable to trade with China (Kleinberg and Fordham 2013; Kuk, Seligsohn, and Zhang 2018) and congressional support for tough‐on‐China legislation. These studies provide important evidence of both constituents’ anxieties and legislative behavior, yet we still know relatively little about the connection between the two.…”