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COVID, elite rhetoric, and Americans’ attitudes toward U.S. trade practices with China
Abstract
Objectives: In this article, we consider how the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluations of Donald Trump combined to influence Americans’ attitudes toward U.S. trade practices with China. We suggest that psychological factors—such as confirmation bias and transfer of grievances—influence how individuals evaluate the costs and benefits of trade. Specifically, we argue that the severity of the pandemic (reflected by both cumulative deaths and news coverage of the pandemic) and the rhetoric of (then) President Trump came together to influence Americans’ attitudes toward trade with China.
Methods: To assess the COVID effect, the Trump effect, and their interaction effect on trade opinion, we merge data from 39 waves of the weekly Nationscape surveys, conducted from October 2019 to July 2020 (N = 62,171), with data on weekly COVID coverage for nine national news sources and cumulative state-level weekly data on COVID-related deaths. We estimate our models using hierarchical ordered logit.
Results: Our findings suggest that COVID-related news cov- erage, cumulative COVID deaths, and Americans’ favorability toward Donald Trump have strong positive effects on Ameri- cans’ support for trade tariffs on Chinese imports. Further, we find that the effects of COVID deaths on attitudes toward China tariffs are moderated by Trump favorability, with the effect of COVID deaths significantly stronger among Trump favorables.
Conclusion: The COVID pandemic and evaluations of Don- ald Trump worked both independently and together to shape Americans’ attitudes toward China tariffs.
Objective
This study examines how political elites influence public opinion on international organizations (IOs), focusing on the impact of President Donald Trump's rhetoric on attitudes toward the World Health Organization (WHO), UN, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
Methods
Using data from the 2020 American National Election Studies (ANES), we analyze the relationship between Trump support, political knowledge, and public evaluations of these IOs.
Results
We find a significant “Trump effect” on attitudes toward all three IOs. Trump supporters exhibited significantly lower evaluations of the WHO, UN, and NATO. Moreover, highly knowledgeable Trump supporters were even more likely than their less knowledgeable counterparts to reduce their support for these organizations in response to Trump's rhetoric.
Conclusions
Our findings suggest that highly knowledgeable Trump supporters are more attentive to his political messages and better equipped to process and absorb them, leading to much more reduced support for IOs. This highlights the role of political elites in shaping public opinion on international institutions, particularly among politically engaged individuals.
Objective
In this paper we consider the possible effects of contextual economic conditions (i.e., job losses attributed to trade, general unemployment) and subjective economic evaluations on how Americans think about international trade.
Methods
We use data from the 2016 Voter Study Group survey and from the 2016 American National Election Study, and we supplement these survey data with data on state contextual variables from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and from the Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program of the U.S. Department of Labor.
Results
We find that state job losses linked to trade have discernible effects on Americans' attitudes toward trade, as do subjective economic evaluations tied to confidence and anxiety about the economy.
Conclusion
Simply, (trade‐related) economic context has a strong effect on how Americans think about expanded and free trade.
How does elite communication affect citizens' attitudes towards trade agreements? Building on a growing literature on context factors influencing public opinion about trade and trade agreements, we argue that citizens rely on cues provided by political elites, especially political parties, when forming their views towards these agreements. Such cueing effects are most likely for citizens with little information about a trade agreement and for citizens receiving cues from trusted elites. In addition, citizens exposed to cues from non-trusted elites should exhibit a source-opposing effect. Our key contribution is to test these expectations relying on a survey experiment on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) carried out in Germany and Spain. The findings from our experiment support the existence of elite cueing effects, although to a limited degree. Overall, the paper contributes to a better understanding of public opinion towards TTIP, trade policy attitudes, and public opinion more generally.
This article offers the first systematic and comparative analysis of the effects of elite communication on citizen perceptions of the legitimacy of international organizations (IOs). Departing from cueing theory, it develops novel hypotheses about the effects of elite communication under the specific conditions of global governance. It tests these hypotheses by conducting a population-based survey experiment among almost 10,000 residents of three countries in relation to five IOs. The evidence suggests four principal findings. First, communication by national governments and civil society organizations has stronger effects on legitimacy perceptions than communication by IOs themselves. Secondly, elite communication affects legitimacy perceptions irrespective of whether it invokes IOs’ procedures or performance as grounds for criticism or endorsement. Thirdly, negative messages are more effective than positive messages in shaping citizens' legitimacy perceptions. Fourthly, comparing across IOs indicates that elite communication is more often effective in relation to the IMF, NAFTA and WTO, than the EU and UN.
President Trump is often at odds with the conservative establishment over a range of issues, not least of which is foreign policy. Yet it remains unclear whether supporting "Trumpism" is commensurate with coherent foreign policy views that are distinct from conventionally conservative positions. We evaluate whether the foreign policy views of Trump's supporters, both in the voting public and among activists, differ from those of other Republicans. We use the 2016 ANES to examine Republican primary voters and the new 2016 State Convention Delegate Study to assess Republican activists. In doing so, we reveal systematic differences in foreign policy preferences between Trump supporters and more establishment conservatives. We demonstrate that the status-threat model need not be confined to domestic politics. Indeed, it may be extended to explain foreign policy preferences on the political right, that of Trump's supporters in the present case. In doing so, we also find evidence that status threat may well be the source of fracture in the Republican Party.
This paper investigates popular non-support for international organizations (IO), asking two questions. First, are attitudes within the mass public becoming less supportive of IOs? Second, how can we explain these IO attitudes, especially when the mass public appears to know relatively little about specific international institutions? Using survey data from the International Social Survey Programme’s National Identity module, fielded across multiple countries in 1995, 2003, and 2013, it reports that on average and within most countries, citizen attitudes about IOs have become less positive over time. To explain these attitudes, this paper argues that citizens tend to group things that appear as “international” such as cross-border economic flows and IOs. While citizens might feel positively or negatively about these international factors, this grouping implies that they view them similarly, based on what they can feel from the international level related to their job and income. Thus, less (more) skilled citizens who are hurt by (who benefit from) economic globalization should express more negative (positive) views about IOs. Controlling for cultural attitudes socialized through education, we find that skill is a statistically significant and substantively strong predictor of IO attitudes. We also show how this individual-level skill difference gets larger in countries that are more and/or less-favorably exposed to economic globalization.
Competition is a defining element of democracy. One of the most noteworthy events over the last quarter-century in U.S. politics is the change in the nature of elite party competition: the parties have become increasingly polarized. Scholars and pundits actively debate how these elite patterns influence polarization among the public (e.g., have citizens also become more ideologically polarized?). Yet, few have addressed what we see as perhaps a more fundamental question: has elite polarization altered the way citizens arrive at their policy opinions in the first place, and if so, in what ways? We address these questions with a theory and two survey experiments (on the issues of drilling and immigration). We find stark evidence that polarized environments fundamentally change how citizens make decisions. Specifically, polarization intensifies the impact of party endorsements over substantive information and, perhaps ironically, stimulates greater confidence in those – less substantively grounded – opinions. We discuss the implications for public opinion formation and the nature of democratic competition.
Despite wavy national economies and a perception among observers that economic globalization is growing increasingly unpopular, aggregate support for free trade remains quite high across Latin America. This finding is robust to the wording of survey questions and has been quite resilient through time, even in the face of economic stagnation. Current theories of trade preferences, including the widely applied Heckscher-Ohlin model, do not explain this trend. Instead, the author proposes a theory of trade preferences based not on what citizens produce but on what they consume. Statistical analyses of different surveys, including one conducted in fourteen Latin American countries, demonstrate that a consumption-based approach best accounts for trade preferences across individuals and countries. Moreover, the theory provides an explanation for the overall popularity of free trade in Latin America: citizens recognize and appreciate the lower price, increased variety, and higher quality of goods that have come in the wake of trade liberalization.
An extensive literature addresses citizen ignorance, but very little research focuses on misperceptions. Can these false or
unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? Previous studies have not tested the efficacy of corrections in a realistic
format. We conducted four experiments in which subjects read mock news articles that included either a misleading claim from
a politician, or a misleading claim and a correction. Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions
among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually
increase misperceptions among the group in question.
KeywordsMisperceptions-Misinformation-Ignorance-Knowledge-Correction-Backfire
This paper uses three years of individual-level data to analyze the determinants of individual preferences over immigration policy in the United States. We have two main empirical results. First, less-skilled workers are significantly more likely to prefer limiting immigrant inflows into the United States. Our finding suggests that, over the time horizons that are relevant to individuals when evaluating immigration policy, individuals think that the U.S. economy absorbs immigrant inflows at least partly by changing wages. Second, we find no evidence that the relationship between skills and immigration opinions is stronger in high-immigration communities. © 2000 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technolog
Four studies demonstrated both the power of group influence in persuasion and people's blindness to it. Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one's political party. This effect overwhelmed the impact of both the policy's objective content and participants' ideological beliefs (Studies 1-3), and it was driven by a shift in the assumed factual qualities of the policy and in its perceived moral connotations (Study 4). Nevertheless, participants denied having been influenced by their political group, although they believed that other individuals, especially their ideological adversaries, would be so influenced. The underappreciated role of social identity in persuasion is discussed.
Why has the relationship between partisan identification and Americans' trade attitudes shifted in recent years? We suggest that recent shifts in trade attitudes among partisans are driven by Donald Trump, who staked out a position on trade that is at odds with the position on trade traditionally held by Republicans. Using panel data from the Voter Study Group (VSG) surveys from 2011, 2016, and 2017, we conduct cross‐sectional analyses showing that the relationship between partisanship and trade attitudes has shifted dramatically from 2011 to 2016/2017; in 2011, Republicans were significantly more supportive of expanded trade, but by 2016/2017 the relationship had reversed, with Democrats significantly more supportive of trade. We link changes over time in trade attitudes with how Americans evaluate Trump: individuals with favorable attitudes toward Donald Trump are significantly more likely to shift their attitudes in an antitrade direction from 2011 to 2016. Because so many more Republicans have favorable attitudes toward Trump, the aggregate effect of Trump favorability is to shift Republicans as a group to be less favorable toward trade than Democrats. We suggest that Donald Trump has had a transformative effect on Americans' trade attitudes, with previous supporters (opponents) of expanded trade now expressing opposing (supporting) attitudes.
Protectionist measures often have target countries, and public support for such measures depends on who the targets are. We identify such target effects on protectionist sentiments and examine the effects of information in tempering protectionist sentiments in East Asia. Using an original survey experiment in China, Japan, and South Korea, we test how providing information about the costs of protectionism changes public attitudes toward targeted protectionist measures. We found that providing a target country identity increased public support for protectionism by 8.6%. Providing cost information, on the other hand, reduces support for protectionism by 10%. We also found that information and target effects persist in the presence of the other: Receiving cost information reduces support for both general and targeted protectionism but does not necessarily mute the target effect. Similarly, when reputation and retaliation costs are associated with protectionism, knowing a target country identity still increases public support for protectionism.
Do elite cues exert extensive, conditional or minimal influence on public support for military alliances in the United States? I assess the boundaries of elite leadership on public opinion towards alliances by dividing partisan respondents into wings based on isolationism and militant assertiveness. If co-partisan elite cues change public attitudes across three or four wings within their party, elites exert extensive influence. Elite cues exert conditional influence if they reach two party wings, and minimal influence if they impact one or no wings. Using two conjoint survey experiments to examine public attitudes towards forming and maintaining international alliances, I find that elite cues exert extensive influence, but some individuals hold rigid alliance attitudes. Staunch alliance supporters in the Democratic party and consistent alliance skeptics in the Republican party both discount elite cues. Therefore, elites can lead most party wings with alliance cues, but intra-party divisions can constrain their influence.
While previous literature has offered two broad categories of explanation for individual trade preferences: economic self-interest and non-economic factors, we contend that during times of intensified elite discourse on trade, individuals may follow elite opinions to form their opinions on trade. Utilizing data from the 2016 American National Election Survey, we examine the effect of Trump’s protectionist views and rhetoric on public trade opinion. We argue that there was a “Trump effect” on trade attitudes among the mass public in 2016 and this effect went beyond the party line, meaning that Trump supporters, regardless of their partisanship, were more likely to be influenced by his protectionist views and to adopt anti-free trade positions. Moreover, we suggest a conditional effect of political knowledge on the “Trump effect” of trade opinion. Our empirical tests offer strong support for both hypotheses, suggesting a significant “Trump effect” on public trade opinion in 2016.
Despite their less vulnerable economic status, white individuals' attitudes toward overseas trade in the United States may have become more protectionist than those of economically disadvantaged minorities. We present results from five different studies examining two different ways in which trade may have become racialized. First, we examine the extent to which a person's racial identity is associated with levels of trade support. Second, we examine whether the predominant racial identity of a potential trading‐partner country influences people's willingness to trade with that country. Using various surveys and multiple survey experiments conducted over the past 12 years, we find that white individuals have become less supportive of trade than minorities and that whites are more likely than minorities to favor trade with highly similar countries. We suggest that minority support for trade is due to four well‐documented differences in the psychological predispositions of whites and minorities in the United States. Minorities have lower levels of racial prejudice, are lower in social dominance, and express less nationalism than whites. At the same time, there is evidence of rising ingroup racial consciousness among whites. Each of these characteristics has been independently linked to trade support in a direction encouraging greater support for trade among minorities. As the United States grows ever closer to becoming a “majority minority” nation, the racialization of trade attitudes may stimulate shifts in the likely future of America's trade relationships.
When forming opinions, mass publics may implicitly or explicitly value some people’s well-being more than others. Here we examine how two forms of this phenomenon—ethnocentric valuation and moral exclusion—affect attitudes toward international trade. We hypothesize that attitudes toward competition and believing that trade is a competition moderate the extent of ethnocentric valuation and moral exclusion; although all citizens value their co-nationals’ livelihoods systematically more than those of people in trading partner countries, greater ethnocentric valuation and moral exclusion occur when trade is seen as a competition and when individuals hold more positive attitudes toward competition.
Using two survey experiments conducted on representative samples of both Americans and Canadians, we examine how differential valuation of in-country and out-country job gains and losses influences trade policy preferences. We test a series of hypotheses using multiple variables tied to competitive attitudes across two countries that differ in their attitudes toward competition.
Partisan polarization is a central feature of American political life, and a robust literature has shown that citizens engage in partisan motivated reasoning when processing political information. At the same time, however, recent events have highlighted a rising tide of antigovernment sentiment among Democrats and Republicans alike. Using an original set of survey experiments, we find that citizens engage in confirmation bias when they encounter new information, and this is driven not only by party and ideology but also by beliefs about the quality and efficiency of government. Taken together, our findings suggest important limitations to citizens’ capacity to learn about public administration, and expand our understanding of what drives confirmation bias with respect to public and private service provision.
Donald Trump’s ascent to the Presidency of the United States defied the expectations of many social scientists, pundits, and laypeople. To date, most efforts to understand Trump’s rise have focused on personality and demographic characteristics of White Americans. In contrast, the present work leverages a nationally representative sample of Whites to examine how contextual factors may have shaped support for Trump during the 2016 presidential primaries. Results reveal that neighborhood-level exposure to racial and ethnic minorities predicts greater group threat and racial identification among Whites as well as greater intentions to vote for Trump in the general election. At the same time, however, neighborhood diversity afforded Whites with opportunities for intergroup contact, which predicted lower levels of threat, White identification, and Trump support. Further analyses suggest that a healthy local economy mutes threat effects in diverse contexts, allowing contact processes to come to the fore.
Using a population-based survey experiment, this study evaluates the role of in-group favoritism in influencing American attitudes toward international trade. By systematically altering which countries gain or lose from a given trade policy (Americans and/or people in trading partner countries), we vary the role that in-group favoritism should play in influencing preferences.
Our results provide evidence of two distinct forms of in-group favoritism. The first, and least surprising, is that Americans value the well-being of other Americans more than that of people outside their own country. Rather than maximize total gains, Americans choose policies that maximize in-group well-being. This tendency is exacerbated by a sense of national superiority; Americans favor their national in-group to a greater extent if they perceive Americans to be more deserving.
Second, high levels of perceived intergroup competition lead some Americans to prefer trade policies that benefit the in-group and hurt the out-group over policies that help both their own country and the trading partner country. For a policy to elicit support, it is important not only that the US benefits, but also that the trading partner country loses so that the US achieves a greater relative advantage. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding bipartisan public opposition to trade.
When and how do elite messages shape mass opinion on international issues? Do informational or partisan components of elite cues dominate? Recent survey experiments offer conflicting insights. We argue that issue context matters, and that the single-issue nature of most survey experiments masks systematic variation in how elite cues affect attitudes across international issues. These effects depend on the baseline distribution of mass opinion on the issues themselves. Two characteristics of underlying opinion prove crucial: first, the share of those not aligned with expert opinion, and second, the degree of partisan polarization. Where polarization is limited, information effects should dominate. Where issues are polarized, information intake should be limited by partisan attribution. We test these hypotheses using nine survey experiments across a range of issues, including the rise of China, climate change, international institutions, and the use of force. At one extreme, all messages—even those endorsed by generic or opposition experts—can shift opinion; at the other, only partisan-attributed messages matter. Our findings are important not only for understanding public opinion about international issues but also for those interested in mobilizing opinion in a democratic setting.
Influential theories depict politicians as, alternatively, strongly constrained by public opinion, able to shape public opinion with persuasive appeals, or relatively unconstrained by public opinion and able to shape it merely by announcing their positions. To test these theories, we conducted unique field experiments in cooperation with sitting politicians in which U.S. state legislators sent constituents official communications with randomly assigned content. The legislators sometimes stated their issue positions in these letters, sometimes supported by extensive arguments but sometimes minimally justified; in many cases, these issue positions were at odds with voters'. An ostensibly unrelated survey found that voters often adopted the positions legislators took, even when legislators offered little justification. Moreover, voters did not evaluate their legislators more negatively when representatives took positions these voters had previously opposed, again regardless of whether legislators provided justifications. The findings are consistent with theories suggesting voters often defer to politicians' policy judgments. Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7910/DVN/YZQTAH.
We analyze two cross-country data sets that contain information on attitudes toward trade as well as a broad range of socio-demographic and other indicators. We find that pro-trade preferences are significantly and robustly correlated with an individual's level of human capital, in the manner predicted by the factor endowments model. Preferences over trade are also correlated with the trade exposure of the sector in which an individual is employed: individuals in non-traded sectors tend to be the most pro-trade, while individuals in sectors with a revealed comparative disadvantage are the most protectionist. Third, an individual's relative economic status has a very strong positive association with pro-trade attitudes. Finally, non-economic determinants, in the form of values, identities, and attachments, play an important role in explaining the variation in preferences over trade. High degrees of neighborhood attachment and nationalism/patriotism are associated with protectionist tendencies.
Despite the increasing salience of issues related to free trade, research on citizen preferences over trade is sparse, and
largely limited to economic explanations related to objective exposure. The present paper extends this literature by examining
the psychological sources of the protectionist impulse. More specifically, I theoretically and empirically examine how citizens’ chronic needs
for security and certainty, key traits identified by recent work in the political realm, influence their preferences for protectionism.
Examining data from three different national surveys in the U.S. context, I find strong support for the role of these dispositions.
In addition to extending our understanding of the antecedents of trade preferences, the present paper has implications for
the study of personality and politics, suggesting heterogeneity in the relationship of dispositions to ideology across issue
domains. I also discuss the broader implications for American politics, arguing that these findings suggest latent tensions
within contemporary party coalitions.
This paper presents a simple, but theoretically appropriate, model for the influence of party identification on issue attitudes. Most studies simply relate partisanship directly to issues. However, that approach does not explain how one variable affects the other. Here, party identification is modeled as a manifestation of reference group phenomena. As such, a person's issue positions are taken to be a function of perceptions about his or her party's stands on the same issues. In addition, the degree of consistency between partisan perceptions and attitudes should increase with stronger party attachments. The analysis also examines the alternative possibility that a person's beliefs about his or her own party are largely rationalized from the individual's own feelings. The model is tested using data from the 1980 Center for Political Studies (CPS) American National Election Study. The empirical results show that partisanship does provide cues for guiding personal political orientations. At the same time, perceptions of the parties' issue stands are not merely derived from the citizens' own attitudes. Thus, the analysis supports the conventional view of party identification as an example of reference group influence on individual behavior.
Margalit, Yotam. (2012) Lost in Globalization: International Economic Integration and the Sources of Popular Discontent. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2478.2012.00747.x © 2012 International Studies Association
What are the sources of popular opposition to economic globalization? A common answer in the literature is the adverse impact of trade liberalization on some people’s labor market standing and earning prospects. Recent studies also note a correlation between nationalist and ethnocentric sentiments and support for trade protectionism, yet do not test whether these non-economic sentiments are actually a cause of the opposition to freer trade. I argue that many individuals fear not only the oft-cited material consequences of trade openness, but also what they perceive to be its social and cultural consequences. I use cross-national survey data and a survey experiment to test this causal claim. The argument also helps explain why less-educated individuals are consistently more apprehensive about international economic integration than more educated individuals, even in the countries in which economic theory predicts otherwise. The findings have implications for the debate over the policy tools for compensating globalization’s losers and sustaining popular support for further economic integration.
We propose a model of motivated skepticism that helps explain when and why citizens are biased-information processors. Two experimental studies explore how citizens evaluate arguments about affirmative action and gun control, finding strong evidence of a prior attitude effect such that attitudinally congruent arguments are evaluated as stronger than attitudinally incongruent arguments. When reading pro and con arguments, participants (Ps) counterargue the contrary arguments and uncritically accept supporting arguments, evidence of a disconfirmation bias. We also find a confirmation bias—the seeking out of confirmatory evidence—when Ps are free to self-select the source of the arguments they read. Both the confirmation and disconfirmation biases lead to attitude polarization—the strengthening of t2 over t1 attitudes—especially among those with the strongest priors and highest levels of political sophistication. We conclude with a discussion of the normative implications of these findings for rational behavior in a democracy.
This article investigates whether media coverage of elite debate surrounding an issue moderates the relationship between individual-level partisan identities and issue preferences. We posit that when the news media cover debate among partisan elites on a given issue, citizens update their party identities and issue attitudes. We test this proposition for a quartet of prominent issues debated during the first Clinton term: health care reform, welfare reform, gay rights, and affirmative action. Drawing on data from the Vanderbilt Television News Archives and the 1992-93-94-96 NES panel, we demonstrate that when partisan debate on an important issue receives extensive media coverage, partisanship systematically affects—and is affected by—issue attitudes. When the issue is not being contested, dynamic updating between party ties and issue attitudes ceases.
Scholars have documented the deficiencies in political knowledge among American citizens. Another problem, misinformation, has received less attention. People are misinformed when they confidently hold wrong beliefs. We present evidence of misinformation about welfare and show that this misinformation acts as an obstacle to educating the public with correct facts. Moreover, widespread misinformation can lead to collective preferences that are far different from those that would exist if people were correctly informed. The misinformation phenomenon has implications for two currently influential scholarly literatures: the study of political heuristics and the study of elite persuasion and issue framing.
Although it is widely acknowledged that an understanding of mass attitudes about trade is crucial to the political economy of foreign commerce, only a handful of studies have addressed this topic. These studies have focused largely on testing two models, both of which emphasize that trade preferences are shaped by how trade affects an individual's income. The factor endowments or Heckscher-Ohlin model posits that these preferences are affected primarily by a person's skills. The specific factors or Ricardo-Viner model posits that trade preferences depend on the industry in which a person works. We find little support for either of these models using two representative national surveys of Americans. The only potential exception involves the effects of education. Initial tests indicate that educational attainment and support for open trade are directly related, which is often interpreted as support for the Heckscher-Ohlin model. However, further analysis reveals that education's effects are less representative of skill than of individuals' anxieties about involvement with out-groups in their own country and beyond. Furthermore, we find strong evidence that trade attitudes are guided less by material self-interest than by perceptions of how the U.S. economy as a whole is affected by trade.
A central question in the study of democratic polities is the extent to which elite opinion about public policy shapes and potentially manipulates public opinion on those issues. Existing empirical estimates of the effect of elite communication on individual opinion formation are, however, characterized by a number of serious methodological problems, and consequently, there is little in the way of compelling evidence that elites actually influence individual opinions. This paper proposes an identification strategy for estimating the causal effect of elite messages on public support for European integration employing instrumental variable estimation. The paper presents three main empirical results. First, we find that more negative elite messages about European integration do indeed decrease public support for Europe. Our analysis suggests that OLS estimates that ignore the endogeneity, omitted variables, and measurement problems that typically occur in estimating the effects of elite communication are biased, underestimating the magnitude of the effect of elite messages by fifty percent. Second, we find no evidence that this effect of elite messages varies for more politically aware individuals. Third, our estimates are inconsistent with a mainstreaming effect in which political awareness increases support for Europe in those political settings in which elites have a favorable consensus on the benefits of integration. This result is in sharp contrast to the OLS analysis that incorrectly suggests a mainstreaming effect.
Are most voters opposed to globalization? A growing body of empirical research, using data from available surveys of public opinion, suggests that antiglobalization sentiments are strong, especially among blue-collar workers. This article reports the findings from a survey experiment aimed at measuring the impact of issue framing on individuals stated attitudes toward international trade. Respondents given an antitrade introduction to the survey question, linking trade to the possibility of job losses, were 17 percent less likely to favor increasing trade with other countries than were those asked the same question without any introduction at all. Curiously, respondents who were given a protrade introduction to the question, suggesting that trade can lead to lower prices for consumers, were not more likely to express support for trade than those who received no introduction. In addition, the responses of less educated individuals were more sensitive to framing effects than those of highly educated individuals. Without measuring and taking these types of framing effects into account, opinion surveys offer unreliable guides to gauging the extent (and distribution) of opposition to trade among voters. Results from a second experiment reveal that knowledge of the endorsement of trade openness by economists mitigates framing effects and raises overall support for trade liberalization by a substantial degree.I would like to thank Adam Berinsky, Mac Destler, Jeffry Frieden, Judith Goldstein, Jens Hainmueller, Helen Milner, Diana Mutz, Dani Rodrik, Ken Scheve, Mike Tomz, and seminar participants at Harvard, Duke, Columbia, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Pennsylvania for helpful comments on earlier drafts. My thanks also go to Lisa Martin and two anonymous IO reviewers.
This study tests the hypothesis that agents base their opinions about trade liberalization on the distribution effects as predicted by the Heckscher-Ohlin-Vanek (HOV) model. The HOV model is utilized to derive the probable effect of a liberalization move on the returns to different Canadian occupations. The predicted effect is then compared with the opinions that Canadians with known occupations held about the proposed Canadian-U.S. Free Trade Agreement of 1988. It is found that these agents took positions that were generally consistent with the prediction from the HOV model.
Why Is Trade Reform so Popular in Latin America?: A Consumption-Based Theory of Trade Policy Preferences
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Follow the Leader?: How Voters Respond to Politicians' Policies and Performance
- Gabriel S Lenz
Lenz, Gabriel S. 2013. Follow the Leader?: How Voters Respond to Politicians' Policies and Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Changing Party Alignments in American Attitudes Toward Trade: Reflections on the Past Implications for the Future
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Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic
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The Determinants of Individual Trade Policy Preferences: International Survey Evidence
- H O'rourke Kevin