Varieties of Politicization: An Institutional Approach to Trade Policy Contestation

This paper highlights the central role of institutions in structuring patterns of contestation between political actors at the national level. It explores the impact of several institutional characteristics of liberal and coordinated market economies on measures of actor centrality in structural network analysis. Our hypotheses are drawn with respect to how institutional structure impacts upon different types of organizations’ ability to convey their prospective losses. We suggest that not only are different organizations loss averse, their “loss” might actually be a currency which other organizations need, in varying degrees, depending on institutional context. Following this thread through various European Union member states, we demonstrate the extent to which institutions contribute to variegated politicization processes, with contestation forming among different actor constellations. Twitter data collected in the weeks after the announcement of the EU-China Comprehensive Agreement on Investment is machine geo-coded based on user location and hand-coded based on actor-type. The data set is explored through graphic network analysis and results are presented, showing that civil society and unions are more central in coordinated market economies, while firms and government are more central in liberal market economies. This paper contributes to the literature on contestation by demonstrating how this process is patterned by institutions while suggesting a causal mechanism through which such patterns arise.