Offshoring Hollywood:
Political Responses to Globalization in the U.S. Motion Picture Industry
Kerry A. Chase
Department of Political Science
Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155
Prepared for Panel 16-10, “New Insights on Globalization”
Friday, September 1 (8am), Convention Center Room 107B
Abstract
The offshoring of white-collar U.S. jobs has attracted considerable attention in policy
debates and the media, yet the political economy of offshoring remains understudied.
This paper examines the labor market effects of offshoring and the political reactions of
labor groups in the context of the U.S. motion picture industry. The paper evaluates two
hypotheses: first, offshoring is likely to harm low-skilled labor, not high-skilled labor,
aggravating wage inequality; second, these labor market effects tend to place low-skilled
labor and high-skilled labor at odds on trade issues. Consistent with the first hypothesis,
a bootstrap simulation shows statistically significant increases in wage inequality in the
motion picture industry as offshoring accelerated. In support of the second hypothesis,
an ordered probit analysis reveals that the labor groups that sought retaliation against
motion picture imports were concentrated in low-skilled occupations. These findings
challenge the popular perception that offshoring threatens well-educated, high-skilled
U.S. workers. By demonstrating how filming abroad has caused rifts between classes of
labor, the paper provides valuable groundwork for analyzing the political economy of
offshoring in other services. (12,086 words)
Prepared for delivery at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science
Association, August 30-September 3, 2006. Copyright by the American Political Science
Association.
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