Affective Polarization and Trade Attitudes: Evidence from Turkey

• In Event: The Mass Politics of the Backlash against Globalization

Abstract

Does affective polarization drive globalization attitudes? Current studies on the backlash against globalization demonstrate that negative elite cues prime opposition toward international trade. Surprisingly, little is known about how affective polarization, the defining feature of twenty-first-century politics, relates to citizens’ trade preferences. We explore how antagonism toward partisan out-groups influences how people feel about trade by conducting a large-scale survey experiment in Turkey. The sample of 2,300 respondents is funded by the NSF/APSA DDRI grant. Our paper consists of three experiments. In experiment 1, we explore respondents’ support for placing new barriers on imports to protect Turkish jobs depending on whether they receive partisan cues on trade policy preferences of the two largest rival parties. In experiment 2, we ask some respondents to list why they love Turkey after emphasizing the positive aspects of Turkish culture. The Turkish treatment aims to prime Turkish identity at the expense of partisan identity. Finally, we conduct a conjoint experiment to evaluate the relative influence of candidate trade policy positions on candidate support and whether this effect varies depending on the presence of the Turkish identity prime. Controlling for candidate cues from the first experiment while assessing the results of the third experiment also allows us to isolate the effect of partisan animus from elite polarization. Our research advances our understanding of how foreign economic policy preferences develop in developing countries with high levels of polarization.

Authors

• Aycan Katitas, Carnegie Mellon University

• Yunus E Orhan, North Dakota State University