The open economy and its enemies: Public Attitudes in East Asia and Eastern Europe

Duckett, Jane and Miller, William (2016). The open economy and its enemies: Public Attitudes in East Asia and Eastern Europe. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852350

Data description (abstract)

Despite vigorous debates about the meaning and significance of globalisation, it is broadly agreed that there has been a recent trend for relatively closed economies and societies to open up and become more integrated/exposed. This project focuses on this narrower theme of economic and cultural openness. It will investigate public attitudes towards openness within selected developing / transitional countries in east Asia and east Europe. For the purposes of this research, support for openness is defined broadly to include accepting, tolerating, even perhaps welcoming and celebrating foreign ideas, foreign customs, symbols, capital, and personnel (including internationally mobile professionals and managers, rich tourists, foreign employers, poor immigrants and guest workers).

The project will use survey/focus-group methods rather than the ethnographic methods which have been more conventional for research in this area. We regard these alternative approaches as complementary, but the balance has tilted so far towards ethnographic methods that the potential contribution of carefully designed surveys/focus-groups, along with their emphasis on the broad mass of the unorganised public, has been neglected. From a democratic perspective, public opinion in developing/transitional countries is important in itself. But it also constitutes the background against which elites and activists must operate. And it is also important for development, since public resistance to outside influences can affect political stability, thereby encouraging protectionism and discouraging inward investment. Even veteran critics of free-market forces now accept that there is no plausible alternative to the market economy. But there remains a consensus that opening-up economies has not so far helped the poor and weak as much as it should. It has spurred development in the short run, but in a form that threatens longer-term development. The increasing inequality and corruption associated with recent patterns of development is alleged to lead to social conflict as losers interpret greater inequality as greater unfairness. And stability-seeking investors then avoid areas of conflict. Economists focus on resistance to economic openness. But others argue that the central problem of todays global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization and cultural fright can also threaten economic development. A strong sense of national/cultural identity can reinforce social cohesion and aid development in the short-term. But the openness that goes with development may provoke fears (justified or not) that national/cultural identity is threatened, stimulate economic protectionism as a by-product of cultural protectionism, and thus threaten longer-term economic development. Greater emphasis on social safety nets and measures to root out corruption are advocated in order to offset some of the naturally perverse distributional and social consequences of globalisation that threaten long-term stability.

However, it is public support for (or resistance to) openness that is the key socio-political precondition for future development rather than the specific factors that influence it. Perceptions of increasing inequality, for example, are likely to have little effect on the political conditions for development if inequality is attributed to chance, to misfortune, or to circumstances beyond anyones control. In a similar way perceptions of corruption, environmental damage or cultural threat may have very different consequences depending upon the way in which they are viewed by the public. How ordinary citizens feel about the downside of development, quite apart from the downside itself, may have a significant impact on its sustainability. These feelings are likely to reflect local traditions, identities, expectations, and leadership quite apart from the nature and scale of economic trends themselves. Even amongst those who have experienced the downside of development and are consciously aware of it, their thirst for development may outweigh their resentment. The translation from economic statistics to public opinion is never simple and automatic. It is an empirical question.

Public resistance to globalisation may evoke images of riots at international conferences in the relative luxury of Seattle, Prague or Davos. Such events are worth study. But our focus is on a different, less visible, less organised, less international and less politically-conscious public - and on a different, less visible, less organised and far more local concept of resistance. Events, elites, activists and special cases are interesting and important but not all-important. Quite apart from the intrinsic importance of the ordinary public in a democratic perspective, elites and activists operate against the background of the wider public. And it is this wider public that we wish to understand. A focus on this wider and less visible, less organised and less politically-conscious

Downloads

Altmetric