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ABSTRACT
In less developed countries, the higher individuals’ labor skills are, the more they support free trade. This recurrent statistical finding is problematic for extant analytical models used to explain and interpret people's positions on free trade. This article proposes an analytical framework that challenges the dominant full-information factor-endowment approach to public opinion on free trade. The dominant approach assumes informed individuals who relate expectations about how free trade will affect them to their work skills. We propose that most individuals lack information and that their positions reflect the influence of information, frames, economic vulnerability, and political endorsements. We test this alternative approach with a Spanish survey conducted in May 2009 and the ISSP survey conducted in 2003 in a large number of less developed and more developed countries. The Spanish data demonstrate that the population is largely uninformed and that their ideas about the consequences of free trade do not explain contrasts among different socio-demographic groups. Meanwhile, the ISSP data contradict important aspects of the traditional approach and are consistent our alternative approach.
Notes
1. For example, Scheve and Slaughter (2001: 272): ‘In the literature on the political economy of trade policy, it is commonly assumed that individuals evaluate trade policy based on how their current factor incomes are affected, without regard for aggregate national welfare.’
2. CitationMachina (1989) sees the impact of frames on behaviour as one of the thorniest issues for the expected utility model.
3. CitationBeaulieu et al. (2004) suggest that the empirical anomaly may result from the fact that world trade liberalization has disproportionately affected skill-intensive goods.
4. For example, protectionisme, proteccionismo, Protektionismus, hogo-shugi.
5. Hainmueller and Hiscox's hypothesis agrees with this article's approach, but it is not entirely convincing. For one, the status of neoclassical economic theory has varied over time (e.g. Babb, Citation2001). Also, not all undergraduate students throughout the world are socialized into the virtues of neoclassical economics. Finally, students do not necessarily believe what they are taught.
6. This national-representative survey was conducted by ASEP.
7. The original Spanish version of these questions is available on request.
8. The correlation between income and the measure of consumer power is 0.60. There are many missing cases for the variable ‘income’, which leaves us with a sample size of 401 cases. We re-estimated the models presented in the text with this small sample and used ‘income’ as the independent variable. The income coefficient is in the predicted direction, but is not statistically significant. The remaining coefficients remain unchanged.
9. Descriptive statistics for the variables included in the analysis are available on request.
10. We take the alternative possibility, that people are modest about their real knowledge, as unlikely.
11. We omit answers that could not fit in any of these categories. They represent 6.4 per cent of the total number of consequences mentioned.
12. Additional models not displayed in lend support to economic theories that emphasize loss aversion in individual decision-making (see ). The model with only negative representations fits the data better (–log L = –1044.339) than does the model with only positive representations (–log L = –1052.532). The difference is statistically significant at the 0.05 level.
13. These results are available from the authors on request.
14. We replicated these models using a multinomial approach, with Don't Knows as just another category, and as simple logit models, only with those who agreed or disagreed. The results were always the same.
15. The countries are Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
16. Baker's (Citation2005) recent article is based on the World Values Survey: ‘Do you think it is better if (1) goods made in other countries can be imported and sold here if people want to buy them or that (0) there should be stricter limits on selling foreign goods here to protect the jobs of people in this country.’ Contrary to ours, this question is framed as a choice between two possible directions of trade policy, but one would be hard-pressed to claim that it offers neutral choices. It informs respondents about the relationship between free trade and consumption and about the relationship between trade barriers and job ‘protection’. Not surprisingly, those with greater purchasing power support free trade and those with less marketable job skills support protection. What we do not know is if these empirical relationships would be as clear as they are if those frames were removed from the question.
17. The answer categories are ‘strongly disagree’, ‘disagree’, ‘neither agree nor disagree’, ‘agree’ and ‘strongly agree’.
18. In another survey also conducted in Spain by ASEP in February 2009, 79 per cent of the respondents agreed with free trade when the question was worded as follows: ‘Imports should be made cheaper to stimulate the Spanish economy.’
19. The literature on attitudes to European integration has measured socialization processes through an indicator of the number of years that a country has been a member of the European Union (Eichenberg and Dalton, Citation1993).
20. See note 19.
21. The measure is not perfect, but it reflects at least a minimum commitment to liberalize trade. In fact, comparison of this simple indicator with a measure of the ratio of the value of import duties to the total value of imports, a proxy for the level of openness of national economies in 1980 in a subset of 20 countries for which the measure was available, shows a very strong correlation between the two.
22. The response categories are: ‘agree strongly’, ‘agree’, ‘neither agree nor disagree’, ‘disagree’, ‘strongly disagree’ and ‘can't choose’.
23. Descriptive statistics for all the variables in the models are available on request.
24. We re-estimated the final models assuming random slopes for education, occupation and income. Although the variances of the random slopes were statistically significant and the size of some coefficients changed slightly, the signs and statistical significance for the fixed-effects coefficients remained unchanged. These reports are available on request.
25. Models not shown here show that, ceteris paribus, household size (which in contemporary societies increases the economic burden on income earners) is also negatively related to support for free trade (Caldwell, Citation1976).
26. We also tested for the effect of inflation, but it was not statistically significant.
27. We conducted a statistical test of the non-linearity hypothesis and verified that the effect of education is indeed non-linear. We also tested for the existence of an interaction with level of education to account for the fact that more educated respondents are more attuned to what transpires in the public sphere. The estimated coefficient was not statistically significant. Finally, we tested an alternative prediction derived from the theory, which is that the effect of education on attitudes to free trade will become smaller over time, as exposure to neoliberal ideas on trade becomes prevalent and diffuses from the more educated to the less educated segments of society, and from educated segments in countries with a long free-trade policy tradition to educated segments in traditionally more protectionist countries. For this, we compared the coefficients for education in the countries that participated in both the 1995 and 2003 ISSP survey on national identity. What one sees is a slightly greater variance across levels of education in 2003 than in 1995. Therefore, it remains unclear what is the relative role of ideas compared with job adaptability in explaining the observed relationships between education and attitudes to free trade. We also controlled for Katzenstein's Citation1985 expectation of a negative relationship between a country's size and support for free trade, but found no statistically significant relationship.