• Sayumi Miyano Department of Politics, Princeton University

• Kenneth Mori McElwain Professor, Institute of Social Science, the University of Tokyo

In contrast to the industry-level theories of domestic politics of trade, recent studies find that within-industry differences among firms divide winners and losers of globalization, particularly under today’s development in intra-firm trade and global value chains. Yet there is little empirical evidence on the actual perceptions of firm managers. Do firms actually perceive the firm-level divide? Are they willing to build political coalitions along the new globalization cleavage? We argue that given the complex nature of both the global value chains and trade agreements, firms rely less on the information of large firms within the industry and more on firms in the upstream and downstream of their production processes when assessing the impact of new trade policy on their business. We test this through a survey experiment on Japanese firm managers in the manufacturing industry.

Sayumi Miyano is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. She studies the politics of global governance, foreign direct investment, and trade. Prior to the Ph.D. program, she received a B.A. and an M.A. in Law and Political Science from the University of Tokyo.