Link is backwards – national welfare states reduce attachments to reactionary populism

With its estimable footprint, however, how the welfare state actually affects antiglobalization nationalism turns out to be a matter of considerable debate and uncertainty. On the one hand, the welfare state may dampen anti-globalization nationalism. Rooted in the tradition of Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation (1944), many scholars articulate how the welfare state’s insurance, social rights, redistributive and/or compensatory functions can ease economic pain and insecurities related to political and economic globalization. John Ruggie famously dubbed “embedded liberalism” as the post-War system of mutually reinforcing multilateral economic openness with safeguards to protect national societies (Ruggie 1982). Scholars in this tradition not only find that economic openness might strongly spur welfare state development (Cameron 1978; Katzenstein 1985; Garrett 1998), but that ex ante welfare state effort might deepen commitments to economic and political openness. The welfare state’s fostering of globalization, here, can involve social policies directly dampening nationalist backlash (Hays 2009), but also how social policy moderates, dampens the tendency of economic suffering to spur anti-globalization nationalism (Burgoon 2009, 2013). These studies clarify such claims with respect to individual, party, or policy outcomes, and different faces of globalization – ranging from trade openness (Ehrlich and Hearn 2014; Rickard 2015), immigration (Crepaz and Damron 2009), capital investment (Bordo et al. 1999), and European integration (McNamara 2015). In line with this is the view that a stalling or rolling-back of social policy may be spurring rising nationalism (Milner 2019; Snyder 2019; Trubowitz and Burgoon 2020). Buttressing this focus on welfare-policy origins of global interconnectedness, finally, are studies suggesting that social policy’s lowering of economic insecurities may stem voter support for radical populist parties (Swank and Betz 2003). All told, this thicket of 6 insights provides good reasons to expect welfare states to have an “embedded liberalism” effect that diminishes anti-globalization nationalism.