Local Participation in the Global Economy: How Regional Trade Integration Affects Citizens’ Preferences on Cultural Issues

Political preferences about cultural issues have loomed increasingly large as determinants of citizens’ voting decisions in recent elections. The emergence of a social cleavage between universalism and particularism has often been attributed to structural change and individuals’ economic grievances stemming from globalisation. Most literature has emphasised the backlash effects of specific trade shocks in areas with historically strong manufacturing sectors. This article builds on this literature by highlighting the role of integration in global value chains as a core antecedent of public opinion on cultural issues. We employ firm-level microdata from the UK ONS Annual Business Survey, which allow us to measure the share of importers and exporters of goods and services among businesses in each UK parliamentary constituency (2014-2023). We match that data with individual-level data from the British Election Study panel survey to test through which mechanisms globalisation affects cultural preferences in regions with different sectoral specialisations and different levels of success in the open economy. We also examine the links between globalisation, cultural preferences and party preferences, with a particular focus on the determinants of preferences for the populist party Reform UK. We hypothesize that greater participation of local businesses in the global economy is associated with more favourable views toward immigration and less favourable views toward populist parties, but that this effect is stronger for sectors that are a particular source of local pride, such as manufacturing, compared to other sectors that do not generate such widespread identification, such as service industries. Moreover, we expect the share of exporters among local businesses to be more strongly associated with citizens’ cultural and party preferences than the share of importers. Our empirical tests support our intuitions. Our findings have implications for the study of social cleavages and the role of economic structure in cultural preference formation and voting behaviour.