The Politics of Globalization in a World of Global Cities

Scholarship in International Political Economy (IPE) is fundamentally concerned with the question of how the redistributive impact of globalization across different units of analysis shapes the politics of foreign economic policy. While previous work in IPE has explored the “winners” and “losers” of globalization with respect to factors of production, sectors, and firms, it has yet to grapple with the political implications of the redistributive impact of globalization across space. In particular, scholarship in economic geography and urban studies suggests that in spatial terms, the main beneficiaries of contemporary globalization are territorial formations known as “global cities”, whose globalization-driven prosperity comes at the expense of vast hinterland regions that are faced with stagnation and decline in the context of globalization. The goal of this project is to explore the implications of this economic geography of global cities and hinterlands for the politics of globalization. Chapter 2 begins with a conceptual discussion of this economic geography, with a view towards detailing the processes which constitute global cities and hinterlands as territorial formations that win and lose, respectively, from globalization. Chapter 3 theorizes how this economic geography shapes individual preferences over globalization, and thereby engenders distinctive mass foreign economic policy coalitions organized along “global city versus hinterland” lines. Chapter 4 analyzes globalization-related public referenda in Costa Rica and the UK with a view towards documenting whether the economic geography of global cities and hinterlands does indeed underpin spatial foreign economic policy coalitions along these lines. Drawing on a range of geographically explicit data, it provides evidence that suggests the importance of internationalist “global city coalitions” and protectionist “hinterland coalitions” for the mass politics of globalization. In Chapter 5, I document the impact of these spatial foreign economic policy coalitions on patterns of legislative voting over trade policy in the US Congress. In Chapter 6, I provide suggestive evidence that the interaction between electoral regimes and the electoral geography of mass global city coalitions affects cross- national variation in foreign economic policy outcomes