compares cosmopolitan vs communitarian issue positions of national, European and global elites. It is important to go beyond the national elite focus since the prototypical members of a cosmopolitan elite are thought to be no longer attached to one national context but to have an entire region or even the ‘global village’ as their point of reference. Our empirical analysis supports this expectation: The positions of European-level elites turn out to be even more strongly cosmopolitan than those of national elites, which indicates that a particularly large gap exists between the cosmopolitanism of European elites and the more communitarian orientation of mass publics. Cultural explanations - measured by embeddedness in transnational networks - have the greatest explanatory power. Those elites who have more transnational contacts and travel experience are more cosmopolitan with regard to trade, immigration and supranational integration. However, economic explanations help us to explain within-elite variance in cosmopolitanism. In particular, we find that business and labour union elites diverge strongly in their positions on international trade and supranational integration.

offers a comprehensive analysis of political claims-making in the age of globalization, investigating issue positions of collective actors across countries and polity levels and distinguishing between economic, cultural and political dimensions of globalization. The cultural dimension is centred on migration, human rights and climate change, and the economic dimension is centred on international trade. Positions on political globalization vary between NAFTA members Mexico and the USA, where it is a trade issue, and EU members Germany and Poland, where it is part of the cultural dimension. Global actors (mostly NGOs and UN orgs) take cosmopolitan positions. Among domestic actors there is a marked differentiation between predominantly cosmopolitan executive and administrative state actors and experts, and legislative and civil society actors with more strongly communitarian leanings. On trade and regional integration issues, we find more classic economic-interest explanations. Here, labour unions and farmers are found on the communitarian side, whereas business associations and representatives of large firms strongly favour free international trade and regional integration.