Economic openness, policy uncertainty, and the dynamics of government support

Does globalization affect popular support for national governments? This article contends that exposure to the world economy obscures mass-elite linkages in developed democracies. Market interdependence, I argue, sends a signal to citizens that the policymaking environment has become more complex. As a consequence, publics are less certain of how to evaluate policymaker performance when exposure to the world economy increases. Informed by research on the role of uncertainty in public evaluations, I test this proposition by modeling the volatility of aggregate government popularity as a function of economic openness in four advanced industrial democracies. Results show that globalization increases the volatility-and, hence, the uncertainty-of public assessments of government performance. The implications for the political economy of advanced capitalist democracies and for models of collective public opinion are discussed.