The Many Faces of Free Trade: Determinants of Abstract and Concrete Trade Support

What determines individuals’ support for free trade? The rise of populist politics – from both the far-left and the far-right – appears to be spilling over the agendas of mainstream political parties. The decades-long consensus on the merits of trade liberalization for economic growth, poverty reduction, and international peace seems at risk. It is then crucial to reexamine the determinants of trade support among the mass public. The international political economy literature has traditionally tried to explain the determinants of trade support by applying economic theories of international trade and looking at individuals’ skill levels or sector of employment as the main explanatory factor. More recent approaches have also considered the role of psychological and symbolic predispositions such as nationalism and xenophobia in shaping trade attitudes. Moreover, most of the previous work in the literature has focused on abstract conceptions of trade – that is, the notion of free trade in principle – rather than concrete measures – that is, specific trade agreements – as the dependent variable. In this study, I take advantage of a 3-wave cross-national dataset which includes countries with different levels of income and makes it possible to test both economic and symbolic theories of trade support, while at the same time providing two abstract and one concrete measure of support for free trade: limits on imports to protect jobs, greater consumer choice, and support for regional preferential trade agreements. To my knowledge, this is the first study to measure the determinants of these different conceptions of trade in a cross-national, longitudinal way.