Multifaceted effects of globalisation on welfare attitudes: When winners and losers join forces

Date01 February 2022
DOI10.1177/1369148120974885
AuthorSijeong Lim,Seiki Tanaka
Published date01 February 2022
Subject MatterOriginal Articles
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120974885
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2022, Vol. 24(1) 31 –51
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148120974885
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Multifaceted effects of
globalisation on welfare
attitudes: When winners
and losers join forces
Sijeong Lim1 and Seiki Tanaka2
Abstract
How does economic globalisation influence individuals’ welfare state preferences? Moving
beyond the unidimensional understanding of globalisation exposure, we intersect two dimensions
of exposure perceptions (gain vs loss and individual vs societal impacts) and propose a novel
typology: collective winner, lone winner, lone loser and collective loser. We then explain the
preference gap among losers (collective losers vis-à-vis lone losers) and among winners (collective
winners vis-à-vis lone winners) by considering three distinct motivations for welfare state support:
compensation, risk-pooling and inequality reduction. We illustrate the usefulness of our typology
using an original survey in South Korea. We find that lone winners are far more supportive of
welfare spending than collective winners. At the same time, collective losers are found to be
much more supportive of welfare spending than lone losers. We provide some first-cut evidence
that the insurance-seeking motivation common to lone winners and collective losers drive their
welfare state support.
Keywords
collective loser, economic globalisation, insurance seeking, lone winner, sociotropic perception,
South Korea, welfare state attitude
Introduction
How does individuals’ exposure to economic globalisation influence their attitudes towards
the welfare state? One major theoretical argument, often referred to as the compensation
thesis, posits that citizens who suffer from globalised economic competition seek govern-
ment protection. Depending on the size and political leverage of these ‘losers of globalisa-
tion’, the micro-level shifts in attitude might aggregate into an effective upward pressure for
social spending and counter the race-to-the-bottom pressure allegedly exerted by market
1Division of International Studies, Korea University, Seoul, South Korea
2 Department of International Relations and International Organization, University of Groningen, Groningen,
The Netherlands
Corresponding author:
Sijeong Lim, Division of International Studies, Korea University, Seoul 02841, South Korea.
Email: sijeonglim@korea.ac.kr
974885BPI0010.1177/1369148120974885The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsLim and Tanaka
research-article2020
Original Article
32 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24(1)
forces (Garrett, 1995; Rodrik, 1997, 1998). The dynamics of compensation seeking and
granting are integral to ‘embedded liberalism’ in Western industrialised polities that have
sought to use government social policies to buffer citizens from the vagaries of international
economic openness and sustain popular support for an open economic order (Ruggie, 1982).
A number of empirical studies have tested the compensation thesis by examining pub-
lic opinion in and across Western Europe and North America (Cusack et al., 2006;
Margalit, 2011; Scheve and Slaughter, 2004; Walter, 2010), as well as in developing econ-
omies (Koster, 2014), and found, at best, mixed empirical support for the thesis. To rec-
oncile the mixed or weak findings, scholars have proposed more nuanced versions of the
thesis by differentiating distinct aspects of globalisation and/or distinct functions of the
welfare state (Burgoon, 2001; Busemeyer and Garritzmann, 2017; Hays et al., 2005; Kim,
2007; Walter, 2017), by factoring in various contextual conditions that affect the political
representation and economic conditions of losers (Burgoon, 2012; Ha, 2008; Rudra,
2002) and by taking into account existing means of protection within and outside the
welfare state (Cao et al., 2007; Hwang and Lee, 2014; Lim and Burgoon, 2020; Rickard,
2012; Schaffer and Spilker, 2016).
Despite the recent advancement in the literature, in our opinion, there are two important
limitations to the existing scholarship. First, the focus in the empirical literature has been
overwhelmingly on identifying losers under globalisation and their demand for compensa-
tory and protective policies. The literature thus fails to capture the potentially multidimen-
sional triggers of welfare support under globalisation, in particular by winners. Second and
relatedly, previous studies have overlooked the potential mismatch between collective-
level and individual-level exposure perceptions, which we believe is key to moving beyond
the narrow perspective that pits losers against winners. For example, an individual may
perceive that economic globalisation has a rather positive impact on oneself but not on
others in society. Individuals with such mixed perceptions about the individual and societal
impact of globalisation may have distinctive welfare attitudes from those who believe
globalisation hurts the majority of the society including themselves.
To address the limitations, we intersect two dimensions of globalisation exposure
perception – (1) gain versus loss perception and (2) self-centred versus collective-level
perception – and propose four conceptual types: collective winner, lone winner, collective
loser, lone loser (see Table 1). Collective winners are those who perceive that globalisa-
tion benefits (or does no harm to) themselves and many others in society; lone winners
are those who perceive that globalisation benefits (or does no harm to) themselves but
hurts many others; lone losers are those who perceive that globalisation hurts themselves
but not most others; and collective losers are those who perceive that globalisation hurts
both themselves and others.1
The overarching aim of this article is to offer a multidimensional typology that pro-
vides a better understanding of individual attitudes towards the welfare state under
globalisation, compared to the conventional unidimensional continuum of winners and
Table 1. Two-dimensional globalisation perception.
Effect on the nation Effect on myself
Not bad Bad
Not bad Collective winners Lone losers
Bad Lone winners Collective losers

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