As a consequence of economic globalization, high-income countries tend to offload their consumption-related environmental and social footprints abroad, oftentimes in poorer countries, via importation of resource- and labor-intensive goods. However, political debates driven by public demands for government regulation of supply chains have erupted in many societies of the Global North. Despite its saliency, this emerging area of globalization politics and especially, individual-level preference formation mechanisms remain poorly understood.

Our study investigates which political mandates citizens endow their policymakers with to intervene in global production and why. We implemented vignette and conjoint survey-embedded experiments with representative samples in the 12 largest high-income importing OECD member economies (N=24,000). Overall, we find that citizens prefer policy instruments which apply to medium- and large-sized companies, support stringent reporting requirements and strong sanctioning provisions. Moreover, support for regulation is partly driven by protectionist motives and by demands for consumer protection.

We contribute to a growing literature in the political sciences that examines which types of policy approaches (voluntary/bottom-up vs governmental/top-down) garner public support. Moreover, we extend the current literature on globalization backlash dynamics by a detailed analysis of how individuals form preferences on international business and trade against the backdrop of increasing awareness of environmental and social footprint shifting.

Our study implies that over the last decade, public opinion on this emerging policy topic has matured. Hence, the sustainability of global production might continue to encroach on agendas in the political mainstream.