Abstract: If nationalism necessarily fuels policy and popular backlash against globalization, as many have claimed, then deeper globalization may be fundamentally incompatible with a world organized around nation-states. Yet it remains unclear whether—and how—nationalism shapes preferences over globalization because the concept of nationalism is multifaceted, and the mechanisms linking it to globalization attitudes are poorly understood. I argue that two distinct nationalist predispositions—national chauvinism and national pride—influence globalization preferences in opposite directions by shaping how individuals interpret information about globalization. National chauvinism drives opposition to globalization, while national pride can foster support for it, especially when chauvinism is weak. Examining survey data from 44 developed and developing countries over two decades, I find that individuals high in national pride but low in chauvinism are consistently more supportive of trade, inward foreign direct investment, immigration, and international organizations. These patterns hold even after accounting for observable economic self-interest through regression adjustment and propensity-score-based weighting. I further test the causal logic of my argument using a natural experiment embedded in the observational data and investigate the informational mechanism through an original survey experiment in the United States.
Keywords: Nationalism; trade attitudes; FDI attitudes; globalization attitudes; IO attitudes.
Presentations: IR Workshop, Harvard, 2022; MPSA, 2024; ISA, 2025; Rappy Institute, Cornell, 2025; APSA 2025.
Status: Awaiting new data; draft available upon request.

Abstract: Countries have signed over 4,500 bilateral tax treaties (BTTs) to avoid double-taxing income earned by firms and individuals in host states. BTTs limit the host state’s claim on each overlapping tax base while allowing the home state to tax the remainder, and many argue that BTTs increasingly restrict host states’ taxing rights—undermining developing countries’ ability to tax foreign firms and facilitating tax avoidance. Assessing when and why states accept lower host taxing rights, however, remains challenging due to the absence of a comprehensive dataset on BTT provisions. I construct the first global dataset of BTT contents, coding 20 provisions in over 4,000 treaties to quantify host taxing rights across diverse tax bases. I argue that democracies and leftist governments selectively concede host taxing rights to attract foreign firms’ business and investment. I find that democracies across the ideological spectrum, as well as leftist nondemocracies, grant lower host taxing rights—but only on incomes and payments generated exclusively by foreign firms, not on other tax bases such as foreign individuals’ income or domestic firms’ outgoing payments. These findings suggest that the rise of global tax evasion reflects uneven state agency, not merely uniform pressures from the treaty regime. Among democracies, moreover, partisan preferences for taxation appear to stop at the water’s edge.

Keywords: FDI; global taxation; bilateral tax treaties; government ideology; domestic politics.
Presentations: Asian PolMeth 2024; APSA 2024; IPES 2025.
Award: APSA Best Poster Award.
Status: Preparing for submission.