Globalization and the Perceptions of American Workers

Using evidence from public opinion polls Scheve (political science, Yale U.) and Slaughter (economics, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire) discuss the attitudes of American workers towards globalization, concluding that there is a strong division in attitude based on education and skill levels, with less-skilled workers seeing globalization as a threat. The authors delineate globalization and their analysis in purely economic terms as they discuss the public opinion evidence on US opposition to globalization, various economic models to interpret the differences in opinion of the surveys, the larger context of recent US labor-market pressures and how these affect worker preferences. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kenneth Scheve is Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a Senior Fellow at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute. He currently serves as the Director of The Europe Center at FSI. His research interests are in the fields of international and comparative political economy and comparative political behavior with particular interest in the behavioral foundations of the politics of economic policymaking.

Matthew J. Slaughter is the Paul Danos Dean and the Earl C. Daum 1924 Professor of International Business at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He is also the founding Faculty Director of Tuck's Center for Global Business and Government. In addition, he is currently a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research; an adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; a member of the advisory committee of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, a member of the academic advisory board of the International Tax Policy Forum; and an academic advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute.