Politics stops at the ports: Tracing the politicization of U.S. trade policy negotiations

The past decades have seen an extraordinary level of partisan polarization pertaining to the conduct of American foreign policy. Yet in regard to trade policies, political demarcation lines appear to follow an atypical pattern. While the negotiation processes concerning the TPP and TTIP agreements have been endorsed and opposed from various parts of the political spectrum, U.S. policy elites’ preferences appear to clearly tilt in favor of these momentous ‘free trade partnerships.’ Furthermore, while TTIP has become highly politicized and thus visible within European discourses, the same dynamics do not appear to be at work within the U.S. This paper will examine the patterns of politicization (or lack thereof) concerning the issue of the TTIP negotiation process in particular. The main hypothesis will focus on elite-driven politici-zation mechanism, by which the levels of divergence found among preferences of partisan elites are ex-pected to correlate with a topics salience within mediated discourse. As a key variable, politicization will be defined both in terms of divergence within elite preferences (through statements or voting behavior) as well as TTIP’s salience within a mediated discursive environment. The paper will draw on data from Congressional records, policy polling and the Media Cloud database.