Doctoral Dissertation Research: Globalization and Representation in Developed Democracies

经济全球化是否会影响世界上成熟的民主国家的政治代表性？如果是这样的话，是如何做到的呢？尽管有关全球市场对国内政治影响的文献越来越多，但学者们忽略了代表性这个根本问题。对代表性的研究仍然是关于大众和精英政治行为的很大程度上独立的文献的领域。尽管经济表现在这些著作中占有重要地位，但学者们并没有探究外部经济如何影响当代政治制度在多大程度上符合代表制、责任制和响应性的民主理想。拟议的研究将承担这项任务。在全球化下，各国政府变得更加依赖外部环境，使得政策制定者对经济健康状况的控制变得更少。反过来，选民变得不那么倾向于从经济状况的角度来评估精英阶层的表现。这项研究认为，这些发展对表象有两个相关的后果。首先，公开度的增加降低了选民要求政府对过去的表现负责的可能性。其次，开放降低了精英们回应大众偏好、而不是经济政策的动机。简而言之，全球化扰乱了国内行为者和政策结果之间的联系，改变了代议制民主的机制。本文的研究将对全球化文学做出实质性和方法论上的贡献。实质上，这项研究与过去关于绩效和政策结果的工作不同，认为完全理解全球化的影响需要考虑公民的偏好和精英战略。从方法上讲，研究将分四个阶段检验这一论点。首先，将对政府的受欢迎程度进行动态分析，以评估增加的公开性是否会影响公民评估精英绩效的清晰度。第二，将进行多层次分析，以调查这种关系是取决于国家政治背景还是取决于选民的特征。接下来，将进行政治家战略的比较案例研究，以考察在一个部分全球化的世界中，政策选择在多大程度上受到国内政治需求的驱动。最后，将结合精英和大众对全球化政策反应的立场来评估它们的一致性。拟议的研究有几个潜在的影响。首先，它对经济开放如何影响发达民主国家的代表性提出了首批全面的解释之一。其次，通过这样做，这项研究可能会质疑基于大众和精英偏好基础的传统假设。第三，这项研究将揭示，在一个日益相互依存的世界中，国家政治机构，特别是选举本身，在多大程度上可以继续充当民主的工具。

Does economic globalization affect political representation in the world's established democracies? If so, how? Despite a growing literature on the effect of global markets on domestic politics, scholars have ignored the fundamental question of representation. The study of representation remains the province of a largely separate literature on the political behavior of masses and elites. And though economic performance figures prominently in these works,scholars do not explore how the external economy affects the extent to which contemporary political systems live up to the democratic ideals of representation, accountability, and responsiveness. The proposed research will take up this task. Under globalization national governments become more dependent on the external environment, leaving policymakers with less control over the health of the economy. The electorate in turn becomes less inclined to evaluate elite performance in terms of economic conditions. This study argues that these developments carry two related consequences for representation. First, increased opennessreduces the likelihood that voters hold their governments accountable for past performance. Second, openness reduces elite incentives to respond to mass preferences over economic policy. In short, by upsetting links between domestic actors and policy outcomes, globalization alters the mechanisms of representative democracy. The proposed research will make a contribution to the globalization literature both substantively and methodologically. Substantively, the study parts from past work on performance and policy outcomes to argue that a complete understanding of the impact of globalization requires a consideration of citizen preferences and elite strategies.Methodologically, the study will test the argument in four stages. First, dynamic analyses of government popularity will be performed to assess whether increasing openness affects the clarity with which citizens evaluate elite performance. Second, multilevel analyses will be conducted to investigate if this relationship is conditional on national political context or on voters' characteristics. Next, comparative case studies of politician strategy will be done to examine the extent to which policy choices in a partially globalized world are driven by the demands ofdomestic politics. Finally, measures of elite and mass positions over policy responses to globalization will be combined to assess their congruence.The proposed research has several potential impacts. First, it proposes one of the first comprehensive accounts of how economic openness affects representation among the developed democracies. Second, by doing so the research may call into question conventional assumptions over the bases of mass and elite preferences. And third, the research will reveal the extent to which national political institutions particularly elections themselves can continue to serve as instruments of democracy in an increasingly interdependent world.