Anti-Americanism and Public Attitudes toward Transatlantic Trade

Abstract

The recent debate about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) has triggered widespread opposition to the trade agreement in Germany. It is not clear, however, what factors drive public attitudes toward transatlantic trade. This article explores the role of anti-Americanism in predicting attitudes toward TTIP among the German public. It argues that the impact of anti-Americanism depends on the extent to which political elites frame the TTIP proposal as a basic conflict between American and European values. Using data from two national representative surveys, it is found that attitudes toward America strongly predict support for the TTIP agreement. The results further demonstrate that the effect of national resentment is moderated by issue awareness, with citizens with a strong anti-American sentiment being significantly more likely to oppose the agreement if they follow the elite debate more closely. Taken together, the results suggest that national resentments are more important for the explanation of TTIP preferences than traditional factors such as partisanship, ideology and material concerns.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS

Supplemental material for this article can be accessed on the Taylor & Francis website, https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2017.1332181.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Alexander Jedinger is a Senior Researcher at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences. Prior to joining GESIS, he was a Project Manager for political polls and surveys at Ipsos, Germany. His research interests include political attitudes and voting behaviour, as well as survey methodology.

Alexandra Schoen is a Senior Research Executive at Ipsos, Germany. Her work focuses on public opinion, political communication and survey research.

ORCID

Alexander Jedinger http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3511-0368

Notes

1 Transatlantic Declaration of 1990, available from https://useu.usmission.gov/declaration-u-s-ec-relations (accessed 30 November 2016).

2 See the relevant websites: CDU, available from http://www.cdu.de/ttip; FDP, available from https://www.liberale.de/content/freihandelsabkommen-ttip; SPD, available from https://www.spd.de/fileadmin/Dokumente/Bundesparteitag_2015/B27_IA_8_Globalisierung_gestalten_-_fairen_Handel_ermo__glichen____demokratische_Grundsa__tze_gewa__hrleisten_n.pdf (accessed 15 August 2016).

3 See the relevant websites: Attac, available from http://www.attac.de/kampagnen/freihandelsfalle-ttip/freihandelsfalle-ttip/; the Greens, available from http://www.gruene.de/ueber-uns/jetzt-erst-recht-ttip-und-ceta-stoppen.html; Left Party, available from https://www.die-linke.de/politik/aktionen/ttip-und-ceta-stoppen/; STOP TTIP, available from https://stop-ttip.org/de (accessed 15 August 2016).

4 About Stop TTIP, available from https://stop-ttip.org/about-stop-ttip/?noredirect=en_GB (accessed 30 November 2016). The collection of signatures was conducted from October 2014 to October 2015.

5 Restricting the following analyses to new respondents does not change the substantive results of the multivariate models reported below.

6 The survey included a question wording experiment not related to the present investigation which restricted the analysis sample.

7 Including partisanship and left–right political orientation also allows us to control for direct effects of economic attitudes on TTIP support. From our point of view, anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation attitudes are important drivers of anti-American sentiment but also may directly impact on issue orientations. Although partisanship and left–right orientation are far from perfect as indicators of support for free market capitalism and globalisation, we regard them as reasonable proxies for economic issue preferences (see e.g. Treier and Hillygus 2009).

8 However, one could still argue that we overestimate the effect of national prejudice because economic values regarding capitalism explain trade preferences rather than specific national resentments. To conduct a stricter test of our hypotheses we also include wave 11 of the German Internet Panel (Blom et al. 2016c), which asked respondents to evaluate the following statements on a five-point scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree): ‘Politics should not intervene in the economy’ and ‘Income and wealth should be redistributed to the benefit of ordinary people’. We take both as indicators of support for capitalism and redistribution. In the Supplementary Appendix we provide Table A1, which displays the results. Attitudes toward America are still the most powerful predictor of trade preferences, b = −0.40, p < 0.001. Although the interaction between anti-Americanism and issue awareness is correctly signed and substantial in magnitude (b = −0.19, p = 0.142), it does not attain conventional levels of statistical significance due to the more restricted sample size.

9 One exception is Wolfe and Mendelsohn (2005). They showed that attitudes toward the US are a strong predictor of Canadians’ support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).