Abstract
Globalization is typically defined as an expansion of cross-border economic interaction, though the term also embodies less precise though important, noneconomic connotations relating to the erosion of local control, autonomy, and identity in the organization of political, social, and cultural life. At the popular level, these meanings are sometimes conflated with anticapitalist, anti-Western, or anti-American impulses.
Popular attitudes toward globalization, in both its narrow and broad meanings, potentially matter for economic outcomes for two reasons. First, public opinion exerts at least some constraint on local officials in democratic and nondemocratic polities alike. As a consequence, popular attitudes toward globalization may signal local policy tendencies and, perhaps more important, the likely character of policy implementation by local authorities. In this way, public opinion acts as a signal of country or political risk. These risks include direct expropriation as well as indirect expropriation through the ex post imposition of policies such as new labor regulations, corporate taxes, or restrictions on the repatriation of capital. This signaling channel may be particularly important to foreign firms contemplating direct investment in a particular locale.
More directly, popular attitudes may signal the degree of security risk—the possibility that local staff or facilities could be subject to harassment or attack. Such actions range from largely symbolic assaults on well-known foreign archetypes such as vandalism of McDonald's hamburger outlets, to more deadly terrorist attacks by militants targeting foreign businesses, to more broadly participatory mob assaults on foreign-owned businesses, to less publicized kidnappings and assassinations of expatriates that occur on a disturbingly regular basis around the world.
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