How does the welfare state shape attitudes toward globalization? The prevailing view, encapsulated in the idea of ‘embedded liberalism’, is that welfare states partially offset the losses from globalization, resulting in more positive attitudes toward economic globalization. In particular, the losers from globalization are more supportive of globalization where welfare states are strong. In this paper, we provide a different perspective on the link between welfare states and attitudes toward globalization. We argue that welfare states not just compensate the losers from globalization, but shape more immediately who wins and who loses from globalization in the first place. Expansive welfare states push firms further down in the global supply chain, toward the production of more complex goods downstream. We offer evidence from three studies for several implications from this argument. First, leveraging firm-level data with nearly 5 million observations, we find that downstream firms fare better economically in expansive welfare states. Second, in product-level trade data, we observe that downstream products are exported more in expansive welfare states. Third, drawing on several sets of survey data, we show that employees in downstream firms voice stronger support for globalization in expansive welfare states, and prefer more redistribution in weaker welfare states. We offer a new argument linking welfare states with globalization preferences, identify a new source of cleavages over globalization, and highlight the importance of redistributive politics for the politics over globalization.