Plouffe, Michael; (2023) Politically Endogenous Trade-Policy Attitudes: Evidence from the 2016 US Presidential Electoral Cycle. Center for Open Science (OSF): Charlottesville, VA, USA. (In press).

Text Plouffe - Endogenous Trade-Policy Attitudes.pdf - Submitted Version Access restricted to UCL open access staff Download (278kB)

Abstract

The factors that influence individuals’ attitudes toward international trade have been widely studied. While experimental evidence has demonstrated responsiveness to framing and informational treatments, these effects have not been examined outside the experimental context, where attitudes are largely held to be driven by a combination of individual characteristics and a person’s social and economic context. This study complements the experimental literature through an examination of attitudinal updating during the 2016 US presidential campaigns and election, which I collectively refer to as the election cycle. I identify three pathways based on related literatures and argue that voters may update their attitudes toward trade policy if it is a sufficiently salient issue. I analyze two American National Election Studies (ANES) waves and find evidence of attitudinal updating in response to the Trump campaign’s protectionist agenda: in particular, progressives and highly educated voters were increasingly likely to adopt pro-trade attitudes following the election. Empirically, this study provides a real-world analog to the growing experimental literature, suggesting that individuals may, at least temporarily, update their trade-policy attitudes in response to election-cycle information.

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