Global Capital and National Governments, first published in 2003, suggests that international financial integration does not mean the end of social democratic welfare policies. Capital market ...openness allows participants to react swiftly and severely to government policy; but in the developed world, capital market participants consider only a few government policies when making decisions. Governments that conform to capital market pressures in macroeconomic areas remain relatively unconstrained in supply-side and micro-economic policy areas. Therefore, despite financial globalization, cross-national policy divergence among advanced democracies remains likely. Still, in the developing world, the influence of financial markets on government policy autonomy is more pronounced. The risk of default renders market participants willing to consider a range of government policies in investment decisions. This inference, however, must be tempered with awareness that governments retain choice. As evidence for its conclusions, Global Capital and National Governments draws on interviews with fund managers, quantitative analyses, and archival investment banking materials.
Labor Rights and Multinational Production investigates the relationship between workers' rights and multinational production. Mosley argues that some types of multinational production, embodied in ...directly owned foreign investment, positively affect labor rights. But other types of international production, particularly subcontracting, can engender competitive races to the bottom in labor rights. To test these claims, Mosley presents newly generated measures of collective labor rights, covering a wide range of low- and middle-income nations for the 1985–2002 period. Labor Rights and Multinational Production suggests that the consequences of economic openness for developing countries are highly dependent on foreign firms' modes of entry and, more generally, on the precise way in which each developing country engages the global economy. The book contributes to academic literature in comparative and international political economy, and to public policy debates regarding the effects of globalization.
This article explores the impact of economic globalization on workers' rights in developing countries. The authors hypothesize that the impact of globalization on labor rights depends not only on the ...overall level of economic openness but also on the precise ways in which a country participates in global production networks. Using a new data set on collective labor rights, the authors test these expectations. Their analysis of the correlates of labor rights in 90 developing nations, from 1986 to 2002, highlights globalization's mixed impact on labor rights. As “climb to the top” accounts suggest, foreign direct investment inflows are positively and significantly related to the rights of workers. But at the same time, trade competition generates downward “race to the bottom” pressures on collective labor rights. The authors also find that domestic institutions and labor rights in neighboring countries are important correlates of workers' rights.
Global capital markets can react dramatically to elections in developing countries, affecting governments’ access to finance and sometimes setting off broader crises. We argue, contrary to some ...conventional wisdom, that investors do not systematically react to the election of left-leaning parties and candidates. Government ideology is often an imprecise heuristic, given the diversity in policies among parties, especially those on the left. We therefore expect that neither elections generally, nor elections that produce specific partisan outcomes, are associated with significant changes in sovereign financing costs. Yet we also predict that the election of left-leaning parties will generate volatility in sovereign bond markets, reflecting investors’ uncertainty over future policy outcomes. This volatility is especially pronounced when new governments take office; over time, however, government policy performance enables investors to make increasingly precise estimates of political risk. Volatility has implications for the real economy, as well as for governments’ ability to manage their debt. We test, and find support for, our core expectations using monthly data on sovereign bond spreads and credit default swap prices for 74 developing countries from 1994–2015.
Most research on private governance examines the design and negotiation of particular initiatives or their operation and effectiveness once established, with relatively little work on why firms join ...in the first place. We contribute to this literature by exploring firms’ willingness to participate in two recent, high-profile private initiatives established in the aftermath of the Rana Plaza disaster in the Bangladesh ready-made garment (RMG) sector: the Accord on Building and Fire Safety and the Alliance for Worker Safety in Bangladesh. Using novel shipment-level data from U.S. customs declarations, we generate a set of firms that were “eligible” to join these remediation initiatives. We are able to positively attribute only a minority of US RMG imports from Bangladesh to Accord and Alliance signatories. Firms with consumer-facing brands, publicly-traded firms, and those importing more RMG product from Bangladesh were more likely to sign up for the Accord and Alliance. Firms headquartered in the USA were much less likely to sign onto remediation plans, especially the Accord.
This article investigates the nature of the linkages between trade and labor rights in developing countries. Specifically, we hypothesize that a “California effect” serves to transmit superior labor ...standards from importing to exporting countries, in a manner similar to the transmission of environmental standards. We maintain that, all else being equal, the labor standards of a given country are influenced not by its overall level of trade openness, but by the labor standards of its trading partners. We evaluate our hypothesis using a panel of 90 developing countries over the period 1986–2002, and we separately examine the extent to which the labor laws and the actual labor practices of the countries are influenced by those of their export destinations. We find that strong legal protections of collective labor rights in a country's export destinations are associated with more stringent labor laws in the exporting country. This California effect finding is, however, weaker in the context of labor rights practices, highlighting the importance of distinguishing between formal legislation and actual implementation of labor rights.
This article explores the role of moral entrepreneurship—activism by normatively focused groups, often acting nationally as well as transnationally—in labor rights activism. We focus specifically on ...activism related to US preferential trade agreements (PTAs). We explore how labor-related provisions have made their way into these agreements and how their inclusion has changed over time. Our main focus is on the efforts of interest groups to lobby US policymakers regarding various US PTAs. We discuss whether these lobbying efforts are cast in material or moral terms. In considering several PTAs during the 1990s and 2000s, we find that most efforts are based on material claims, or on a combination of material and moral concerns. We rarely observe lobbying activities that are cast purely in terms of the normative goal of protecting workers' rights.
I consider the effect of global supply chain production - in contrast to directly owned overseas production - for labour rights in low- and middle-income countries. I develop a set of hypotheses ...regarding the conditions under which supply chain workers are most likely to experience improvements in their working conditions and procedural rights. In doing so, I highlight the importance of host country governments in the protection of labour rights: while private governance efforts have intensified in recent years, their success is conditional on local political actors' interests in the protection of workers' rights. Put differently, appropriate protections for labour require that the incentives of participating firms (foreign or domestic) and host country governments align. I also suggest how future research might best explore these dynamics, by focusing its attention at the firm and supply chain (rather than at the country) level.
Interviews are a frequent and important part of empirical research in political science, but graduate programs rarely offer discipline-specific training in selecting interviewees, conducting ...interviews, and using the data thus collected.Interview Research in Political Scienceaddresses this vital need, offering hard-won advice for both graduate students and faculty members. The contributors to this book have worked in a variety of field locations and settings and have interviewed a wide array of informants, from government officials to members of rebel movements and victims of wartime violence, from lobbyists and corporate executives to workers and trade unionists.
The authors encourage scholars from all subfields of political science to use interviews in their research, and they provide a set of lessons and tools for doing so. The book addresses how to construct a sample of interviewees; how to collect and report interview data; and how to address ethical considerations and the Institutional Review Board process. Other chapters discuss how to link interview-based evidence with causal claims; how to use proxy interviews or an interpreter to improve access; and how to structure interview questions. A useful appendix contains examples of consent documents, semistructured interview prompts, and interview protocols.
Contributors:Frank R. Baumgartner, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Matthew N. Beckmann, University of California, Irvine; Jeffrey M. Berry, Tufts University; Erik Bleich, Middlebury College; Sarah M. Brooks, The Ohio State University; Melani Cammett, Brown University; Lee Ann Fujii, University of Toronto; Mary Gallagher, University of Michigan; Richard L. Hall, University of Michigan; Marie Hojnacki, Pennsylvania State University; David C. Kimball, University of Missouri, St. Louis; Beth L. Leech, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; Julia F. Lynch, University of Pennsylvania; Cathie Jo Martin, Boston University; Lauren Maclean, Indiana University; Layna Mosley, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Robert Pekkanen, University of Washington; William Reno, Northwestern University; Reuel R. Rogers, Northwestern University
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