Swinging Back: How Targeted Trade Retaliation is Viewed as Election Interference

• In Event: Economic Coercion in Global Politics

Abstract

In response to the Trump trade war, many affected countries have enacted politically-targeted trade retaliation against politically sensitive swing states and Republican strongholds. Countries use these tactics as an attempt to increase the political costs of trade wars. The use of these tactics has grown and so has coverage of the political motivations behind retaliation. We argue that politically-targeted trade retaliation is likely to be viewed as a form of electoral interference. Building on a growing literature about foreign electoral interference, we argue that public perceptions of electoral interference are not limited to actions which directly target candidates or the mechanisms of elections themselves. Targeting swing states and partisan strongholds can also increase public concerns about foreign election interference. We test our theory using a national survey experiment in the United States fielded before the 2020 election. The study randomized information about the type of trade retaliation that the European Union engaged in when responding to American tariffs. We designed our experiment to assess the effects of politically motivated retaliation on respondent attitudes—above and beyond the effect of retaliation itself. We find strong evidence that Republicans and Democrats alike view politically targeted retaliation as a form of election interference. This is surprising since the retaliation only attempted to harm one side of the political spectrum, the Right. Retaliation targeting swing districts had the greatest effect on perceptions of electoral interference, especially among Republicans. We also find some support for earlier work (Bush and Prather 2020) that suggests partisanship can moderate the effect of electoral interference on attitudes towards foreign states. In our study, Republican attitudes towards the European Union became more unfavorable when trade retaliation was described as politically-targeted, while Democratic attitudes towards the EU were unchanged. Taken together, the results suggest that even economic policies whose primary goal is not electoral interference may nonetheless become viewed in that light. The total “costs” of a trade war where each side trades politically motivated salvos must also include the knock-on, non-economic effects associated with electoral interference: namely, the potential for increased polarization and worsening domestic attitudes towards the foreign counterpart.

Authors

• Max Kagan, University of California, Berkeley

• Ryan Brutger, University of California, Berkeley

• Stephen Chaudoin, Harvard University