Shifting Boundaries: The Role of Partisan Mismatch in U.S. State-Level Globalization

In the United States, the Constitution explicitly restricts state involvement in foreign affairs but despite this legal framework, U.S. states have increasingly found ways to bypass these restrictions and engage internationally. Governors have been empirically identified as the driving force behind this engagement in a way that resembles the President’s role in federal-level globalization. This article tests how the partisan relationship between these executives impacts the extent of a state’s involvement in foreign affairs. Through a regression analysis, I determine the relationship between partisan mismatch and state exports between 2005 and 2020. Additionally, this paper analyzes gubernatorial initiatives and rhetoric across three states providing a more detailed examination of state-level foreign engagement within both partisan mismatched and aligned years. In this paper, I introduce a novel, relevant factor in understanding U.S. state globalization that builds on existing literature on this increasingly pervasive phenomenon.