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Title: Geographic Mobility and Globalization Backlash: Evidence from the NAFTA Import Shock and Populist Votes for Ross Perot
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2022
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Abstract: The geographic mobility of citizens significantly influences the political effects of globalization. Within import-shocked regions, immobile voters support anti-trade populism while those who can migrate to globalizing cities favor trade openness. To test this theory, I train a machine learning model on 9.7 million Census observations of actual geographic mobility to predict an individual's probability of migrating between US commuting zones. I pair this with a panel of voters tracked across the 1992-1996 presidential elections, and a regional import shock from NAFTA between those elections. Among immobile respondents, NAFTA caused a 30 percentage point increase in the probability of voting for the anti-trade populist Ross Perot while mobile voters continued to support mainstream candidates. These patterns are consistent with NAFTA's effects on respondents' wages, employment, and trade policy preferences, but not with alternative cultural hypotheses. These findings challenge the growing consensus that economic concerns over trade have only muted political consequences.
Url: https://gsipe-workshop.github.io/files/Flaherty_JMP.pdf
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Authors: Flaherty, Thomas M
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Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Population Mobility and Spatial Demography, Poverty and Welfare
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