Trade Talk: The Changing Nature of Global Trade Narratives

How do political elites frame trade policy? This paper identifies three dominant narratives in elite discourse on trade. The first is economic, emphasizing trade's impact on growth or employment. The second is value-based, highlighting trade's influence on issues such as human rights, food security, and climate change. The third is geopolitical, linking trade policy to national security concerns, including territorial integrity, political sovereignty, and a country's standing in the international system. We argue that the relative importance of these narratives varies across countries and over time depending on the type of challenge that a country predominantly confronts. When a country faces an economic challenge, such as low growth or high unemployment, the government likely focuses on the economic narrative. When the country faces a geopolitical challenge, the geopolitical narrative will dominate. Finally, the value-based narrative will be relatively most important if the country neither faces an economic nor a geopolitical challenge. We also contend that these differences are more pronounced among elites with foreign policy portfolios (e.g., heads of government and foreign ministers) than among those whose primary focus is trade. To test this argument, we analyze a novel text corpus comprising statements and press releases from heads of government, foreign ministries, and trade ministries in 26 countries from 2010 to 2024. The 26 countries differ in terms of their power, level of economic development, and political system. We use text-as-data techniques, including word embeddings and few-shot classification with large language models to analyse the text corpus. This paper makes three key contributions. First, it presents an original text corpus including texts from political elites from across the globe. Second, it demonstrates the growing centrality of national security concerns in trade policy narratives which goes at the expense of economic or value-based frames. Third, it calls on scholars of international politics to incorporate narrative analysis into the study of trade policy, moving beyond the current focus on trade measures.