ABSTRACT
Recent trends towards greater international economic integration continue to raise questions about how public policies will cope with or improve new inequalities and risks attached to globalisation and truly global problems such as immigration, environmental destruction and poverty. While establishing greater regional or global policy coordination is a matter of institution building, any change in the balance between national, regional and global decision-making will hinge in part on political will formation, and in turn, on favourable public opinion about creating global power. At the level of national polities, the idea that public policies are made without considering the opinions of elites, likely winners and losers from policy change and the public at large is hard to sustain. And, at the same time, evidence shows that public opinion is strongly shaped by the experience of public policy and public policy traditions (see Pierson, 2004, p. 150; Stimson, 1999). As other chapters in this book suggest, the relationship between national and global processes deserves attention. Awareness and involvement in globalisation processes now play an important role in the development of national identity, political culture and ideology. Is this true of public policy as well? Is globalisation – or the prospect of global policy-making – registering with citizens? With the help of the results of the Asia-Europe Survey, this chapter starts to address this question by finding out how evaluations of policy problems and expectations of the role of government differ between these two regions, and what insights these judgements offer about the future of state capacity and global policy-making.
