(iPoster) Who Delivers the Message? Partisanship, Gender, and Public Support for Trade

• In Event: Poster Session: Public Opinion 2

Abstract

Public opinion on international trade is highly responsive to political elite cues, yet the mechanisms through which messenger characteristics shape these reactions remain insufficiently understood. I develop a theory of identity-based cue taking in trade politics, arguing that because trade is a complex, low-information policy domain, citizens rely on socially meaningful heuristics, particularly partisan alignment and gender to evaluate elite messages rather than policy content alone. I test this argument using a preregistered 2×2 factorial survey experiment in which U.S. respondents evaluate a hypothetical trade agreement while the policy message is held constant and only the messenger’s partisan affiliation (co-partisan vs. out-party) and gender (male vs. female) vary. The design allows isolation of identity-based effects on both policy support and evaluations of messenger credibility, competence, and trustworthiness.
Exploratory evidence from a pre-registered survey study suggests two consistent patterns. First, respondents express significantly greater support for the trade agreement and evaluate the messenger more favorably when the endorsement comes from a co-partisan elite, consistent with partisan motivated reasoning theory. Second, female messengers face a credibility penalty across outcomes, even when delivering identical policy information, consistent with gendered stereotypes surrounding economic expertise in masculine-coded policy domains such as trade. Preliminary analyses provide limited evidence that co-partisan alignment fully offsets this gender-based penalty. By showing how partisan and gender cues shape public evaluations of identical trade messages, this study highlights how identity-based heuristics influence mass opinion in international political economy and help reproduce unequal patterns of political credibility and representation.

Author

• Barna Bose, Florida State University