Trade Rage: Audience Costs and International Trade

• In Event: Budgets and Attitudes Toward Economic Policy

Abstract

Does the logic of audience costs extend to threats made in the realm of international trade? Contemporary international politics features numerous examples of politicians threatening to impose trade restrictions or exit trade agreements only to subsequently back down. Yet scholars have not yet probed whether these politicians or the countries they govern suffer declines in approval or reputation from domestic audiences after backing down from trade threats. We examine these outcomes through an original survey experiment that varies whether or not a hypothetical president threatens to impose tariffs and subsequently follows through. We also vary the party of the president (Democrat or Republican) and the target country (Canada or China). Our approach borrows from recent advances in the audience costs literature that stress the distinction between belligerency and inconsistency costs as well as heterogeneity in respondents’ political beliefs and socioeconomic status. We find strong evidence in favor of the literature's findings on belligerency costs but little basis for the conventional results when it comes to inconsistency. We conclude that on trade matters, respondents are put off by the president having a made a threat at all and are unlikely to punish the president for failing to implement the threatened tariffs. This suggests that the U.S. public is far more dovish on trade topics than security issues -- perhaps because individuals can connect the consequences of trade threats to their material well-being.

Authors

• Donald Casler, Columbia University

• Richard Clark, Columbia University