The Economic Origins of Authoritarian Values: Evidence From Local Trade Shocks in the United Kingdom

• Date: 01 November 2021
• Published date: 01 November 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/00104140211024296
• Author: Cameron Ballard-Rosa,Mashail A. Malik,Stephanie J. Rickard,Kenneth Scheve
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2021, Vol. 54(13) 2321–2353

© The Author(s) 2021

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140211024296

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The Economic Origins of

Authoritarian Values:

Evidence From Local

Trade Shocks in the

United Kingdom

Cameron Ballard-Rosa

1

, Mashail A. Malik

2

,

Stephanie J. Rickard

3

, and Kenneth Scheve

4



Abstract

What explains the backlash against the liberal international order? Are its

causes economic or cultural? We argue that while cultural values are central

to understanding the backlash, those values are, in part, endogenous and

shaped by long-run economic change. Using an original survey of the British

population, we show that individuals living in regions where the local labor

market was more substantially affected by imports from China have signifi-

cantly more authoritarian values and that this relationship is driven by the

effect of economic change on authoritarian aggression. This result is con-

sistent with a frustration-aggression mechanism by which large economic

shocks hinder individuals’expected attainment of their goals. This study

provides a theoretical mechanism that helps to account for the opinions and

behaviors of Leave voters in the 2016 UK referendum who in seeking the

authoritarian values of order and conformity desired to reduce immigration

and “take back control”of policymaking.

1

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

2

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

3

London School of Economics, London, UK

4

Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Corresponding Author:

Kenneth Scheve, Department of Political Science, Yale University, 115 Prospect Street, New

Haven, CT 06511, USA.

Email: kenneth.scheve@yale.edu

Keywords

globalization, backlash, public opinion, political economy, economic policy

Introduction

The liberal international economic order is threatened by a rising backlash

against globalization across much of the developed world. The successful

votes for Brexit and Donald Trump in 2016, as well as the strong performance

of the far-right National Front in the 2017 French presidential elections and the

March 2018 election results in Italy all represent, at least in part, a revolt

against globalization (Milner, 2021;Mansfield et al., 2021;O’Rourke, 2019).

A major question for scholars and policymakers is whether the causes of

the backlash are primarily economic or cultural. At stake in this question is not

only how we understand this important phenomenon but what kind of policy

interventions are most likely to be effective in responding to the backlash. If

the origins are primarily economic, there are a host of potential policies that

could be designed to address the insecurities faced by today’s workers. If the

story is primarily about a reaction to secular changes in modern culture, it is

less clear what interventions would make a difference.

This article argues that cultural values can be in part consequences of

economic change. This suggests that simply thinking of cultural and economic

explanations—whether they are competing or complementary—as disjoint

accounts invites misinterpretation of the role that these forces play in ex-

plaining the backlash against globalization. For scholars and observers who

have emphasized the importance of economic conflict, the endogeneity of

values to economic pressure suggests an important mechanism that is often

ignored in these accounts. Economic change may influence behavior by, as is

usually suggested, affecting the economic policies that individuals support or

by affecting their economic evaluations of politicians, but it also may shape

the values that they hold and in turn the types of leaders and policies that they

favor.

For scholars and observers who have emphasized the importance of values,

the endogeneity of values to economic threats does not mean that values are

not important. To the contrary, it is impossible to understand the backlash

against globalization without their consideration. But it does suggest that in

addition to the forces that socialize individuals into value orientations that are

fixed from an early age, contemporary threats also influence the values that

individuals hold and in turn how they behave. This distinction suggests that

even for political phenomena for which it is abundantly clear that values are

motivating behavior, understanding the underlying conflict may, nonetheless,

be important for explaining behavior and constructing effective policy

interventions.

2322 Comparative Political Studies 54(13)

One set of individual values that has received renewed attention in un-

derstanding the backlash against the liberal international order is a bundle of

characteristics often referred to as “authoritarian values,”understood as an

individual preference for order and conformity and belief that these value

outcomes should be achieved by force if necessary. This definition draws

directly from Altemeyer (1981) but builds on a long literature before that and

resonates with many subsequent treatments of authoritarianism.

Our particular interest in authoritarianism is motivated, in part, by its

role in the surprise outcome of the 2016 UK referendum on European

Union (EU) membership. Fifty-two percent of UK voters chose to leave the

EU in one of the most conspicuous expressions of anti-globalization

sentiment seen in recent decades. Authoritarian values are one of the

best predictors of how people voted in the Brexit referendum. The role of

authoritarian values in the Brexit vote is illustrated by Figure 1,which

presents a smoothed locally weighted average—drawn from a nationally

representative sample of adults in the United Kingdom that was fielded by

the authors—of the proportion of respondents voting Leave against a

measure of authoritarian preferences which we describe in detail below. As

can be seen in the figure, there is a remarkably strong bivariate association

between individuals with greater authoritarian tendencies and the likeli-

hood of voting in favor of the United Kingdom leaving the EU: while

individuals at the lowest observed values of authoritarianism have under a

20% likelihood of voting for Brexit, respondents at the highest values have

over a 90% likelihood of doing so, with the figure demonstrating a clearly

positive slope.

Authoritarian values correlate with anti-globalization and protectionist

sentiments more generally. In the United States, Jedinger and Burger (2020)

show that right-wing authoritarian values correspond with protectionist at-

titudes and, in fact, authoritarianism is the strongest predictor of economic

protectionism in their models. Using data from the American National

Election Studies from 2000 to 2008, Johnston (2013) finds that authoritarian

values are the most consistent indicator of individuals’support for import

restrictions across all years and models. In Germany, Jedinger and Burger

(2020) find that authoritarian values correlate with support for restrictions on

foreign trade, controlling for a wide range of other factors.

To interpret these correlations, however, we need to ask what is driving

authoritarian values. From the publication of Adorno et al.’s (1950) seminal

The Authoritarian Personality, most treatments have viewed authoritarianism

as a fixed characteristic formed in childhood and early adult socialization. In

this article, we build on the early work of Fromm (1941),Lipset (1959), and

Rokeach (1960) and argue that contemporaneous economic threats increase

the adoption of authoritarian values—that is, authoritarianism is not a fixed

disposition, and is at least partly shaped by economic conditions.

Ballard-Rosa et al. 2323