Partisan Cues and Perceptions of Trade Agreement Quality

• In Event: Information and Attitudes towards Trade

Abstract

How do individuals evaluate whether a trade agreement is “good” or “bad?” The Open Economy Politics literature emphasizes the role of individuals’ economic characteristics in determining their beliefs about trade, while a growing behavioralist literature focuses on how individuals’ social characteristics and values drive their attitudes. Most tests of these theories focus on abstract preferences: whether individuals believe trade is good in principle and whether trade should be expanded or restricted. Public opinion about trade, however, is likely to matter most in reference to specific trade agreements, and it is not clear that views about these complex legal arrangements will track with more abstract trade preferences. We argue instead that without deeper knowledge of trade agreements, individuals rely predominantly on partisan cues to assess their quality. Furthermore, we contend that individuals’ predictions about the content of a trade agreement are mediated by partisan cues: individuals are more likely to expect that an agreement— of which they have no prior knowledge— will contain their abstract policy preferences if it is supported by their party. We test these hypotheses with two survey experiments fielded in the United States. This project adds to the literature on partisan cues in low-information environments and reintegrates politics into the study of public opinion and trade.

Authors

• Ethan Miles

• Ruofan Ma, Harvard University