International Studies Quarterly
Footloose Capital in the Land of America First: Populism, Nationalism and Mass Preferences Over Corporate Tax
2026-06-16
Abstracts While outsourcing of production and tax avoidance allow multinational corporations to seek low-cost locations for doing business in a globalized economy, we argue that these strategies may also violate important norms of fair behavior for corporations to contribute to their host countries, leading to heightened preferences for increased corporate taxes, particularly among more populist or more nationalist citizens. Drawing on original survey experiments administered on a nationally representative sample of U.S. respondents, we find that tax avoidance by MNCs corresponds to significantly increased preferences for corporate income taxes, especially among populists. Surprisingly, however, while outsourcing by firms also generally leads to higher preferences for corporate taxes, we do not find that this effect is more pronounced among nationalist respondents. These results speak to the importance of separating out populist from nationalist political movements as drivers of international economic policy in an era of new bases of support for rightwing parties.