Who Supports Global Cooperation? Cooperative Internationalism at the Intersection of Social Class and Economic Development

Throughout the twentieth century, the world has seen a rapid increase in global social, economic, and political integration. According to many studies, attitudes toward international organizations and international cooperation have also grown more positive, particularly among elites and in the affluent, densely connected countries of the global core. Using survey responses on 18 different questions from six cross-national attitude surveys, we find that “cooperative-internationalist” attitudes, though widely popular, are no more common in the global core than on the periphery. Furthermore, we find elites are more likely to hold proglobal attitudes than non-elites only in wealthy core countries. These results indicate that scholars may have incorrectly assumed that (modest) class differences in cooperative-internationalist attitudes in Western countries generalize globally, both within and between countries. We conclude with a call to theorize cooperative internationalism as a function of how different groups of people interpret their own costs and benefits of global cooperation.

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