Partisanship, Trump Favorability, and Changes in Support for Free Trade

• In Event: International Political Behavior

Abstract

The presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump has resulted in a sea-change in how Americans think about free trade. In particular, support for free trade has often been associated with support for free markets, which itself is often been associated with Republican identification at both the elite (Wink, Livingston, and Garand 1996) and mass (Mutz, Mansfield, and Kim 2017) levels. However, since the early 2010s there is considerable evidence that the parties have shifted their relative positions on free trade, with Democrats now more supportive of free trade than Republicans. In this paper we use panel data from the Voter Study Group (VSG) surveys for 2011 and 2016 to explore both patterns of free trade attitudes and the determinants of shifts in those attitudes over time. This data set permits us to track how individuals shifted their trade attitudes over time and to connect changes in trade attitudes at the individual level to a variety of political variables.

We find that the effect of partisanship on trade attitudes has shifted direction from 2011 to 2016, with Republicans significantly more supportive of free trade in 2011 but significantly less supportive in 2016. Moreover, we find that partisan shifts in trade attitudes are primarily due to how individuals evaluate President Trump, with individuals who have favorable views toward President Trump being more likely to change their trade attitudes in a less favorable direction. This suggests a strong leadership effect, with individuals shifting their views about free trade as a function of how they evaluate President Trump. Moreover, we find that the Trump effect exists across the political spectrum—i.e., for Republican, Democratic, and Independent identifiers; Republicans, Democrats, and Independents who have favorable views toward President Trump are significantly more likely to shift their trade attitudes in the anti-trade direction. Finally, we find that political knowledge moves Republicans and Independents in the negative direction on free trade, while the effect of political knowledge is negligible for Democrats; contrary to expectations, it appears that it is not necessarily low-knowledge individuals who shift their attitudes in an anti-trade direction but rather those who are most informed about politics.

Authors

• Ceren Keser, Louisiana State University

• James C. Garand, Louisiana State University