Individual Level of Globalism and Contribution to Local Public Goods

Abstract

"Globalization processes entail the concerns whether, how, and how far it is feasible to achieve the sort of human cooperation and compliance needed to meet the goals of the state and society such as paying taxes, serving in the armed forces, contributing to social causes, which in other words are understood as contribution to public goods. This quantitative four countries comparative project investigates a new approach to the analysis of globalization and its consequences on contribution to local public goods as an instantiation of national determination and cohesion, in a democratic environment. We propose a new individual-level, bottom-up, approach. This approach claims that while nations may vary in the extent to which they are open to globalization processes, within these nations, people vary in the extent to which they themselves are globalized. We claim that the individual's level of globalism explains some of the variance in the way people resolve the social dilemma of contribution to public goods. In order to assess this process we conducted three economics decision experiments: a public good game, a tax compliance game and a 'real life' experiment of donation to local NGO. We examined the Individual's Level of Globalism (ILG) using a scale we developed and validated, as an explanation for these decisions. The research findings support the hypothesis that on top of the country effect, a more globalized individual has a deficient tax morale, donates less to local NGOs and prefers to adopt the 'free-ride' strategy in a public good game."