International Perspectives on Contemporary Democracy by Peter F. Nardulli

Author:Peter F. Nardulli [Nardulli, Peter F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General, Political Ideologies, Democracy, World
ISBN: 9780252075445
Google: sk-DAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 4841847
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2008-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Citizens, Politicians, and Globalization

In the United States, Congress has already addressed globalization, most notably in the form of the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which ultimately passed. Ordinary Americans watched and listened as congressional members debated the wisdom of eliminating trade barriers and promoting fair competition on the North American continent, which, to most Americans, represented a new idea with a lot of unknowns. President Clinton as well as former presidents Bush, Ford, and Carter made a strong case for NAFTA. Corporate America joined them. Former presidential candidate Ross Perot and leading Democrats such as Richard Gephardt strenuously argued against. Perot adopted an alarmist strategy, predicting that workers in potentially affected industries would lose their jobs. Labor and environmental groups sided with the opposition.

Like Iraq, NAFTA received unusually high media coverage, during congressional deliberations, especially, but also in the following years. Unlike Iraq, NAFTA required American citizens to enter new and unfamiliar terrain. Also unlike Iraq, arguments over NAFTA did not fall neatly along partisan lines.

Two types of data shed light on how Americans formed judgments about NAFTA during the time Congress debated it. Aggregate survey data show that a majority of Americans initially opposed NAFTA; by time of its passage, a small majority supported it. Many blue-collar workers endorsed the Perot-Gephardt position, while white-collar workers overwhelmingly supported the treaty. At the beginning of the debate, 34 percent of the populace said they had not heard enough about NAFTA to hold an opinion; by the end, a hefty 26 percent still proclaimed ignorance. People more easily grasp wars than they do international trade agreements, even when abundant information about the latter is readily available.

The aggregate data do not reveal the mental processes that individual citizens employed. Thus they do not allow us to determine whether more and less sophisticated citizens made their decisions in different ways and, if they did, whether the former made the “better” choices. Uslaner’s study (1998), which uses September and November 1993 NBC-Wall Street Journal survey data, comes closer, although the data are not as complete as the Iraq data, which we collected with these questions in mind.

Uslaner’s findings make clear that more and less politically sophisticated citizens, at least as measured roughly by education, coped with the new and unfamiliar policy proposal in similar ways. Not knowing all the details of the proposed policy and lacking a basis on which to make confident predictions about the policy’s effects, people used their feelings toward the key actors in the NAFTA initiative as their primary criterion. Thus people who approved of Clinton and former presidents Bush, Ford, and Carter overwhelmingly supported the treaty. Conversely, those who liked Perot but not the presidents overwhelmingly opposed. In short, lacking experience on globalization issues, and facing much uncertainty, Americans optimized their choices by taking cues from political leaders they liked and trusted (Mondak 1993; Popkin 1991; Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock 1991). Whether use of this heuristic was desirable is debatable; whether it was necessary is not.

During the decade following the passage of NAFTA, many American workers lost their jobs.

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