COVID-19, economic anxiety, and support for international economic integration

ABSTRACT

There are growing concerns that the COVID-19 pandemic is strengthening nationalism around the world by fueling discrimination, unilateralism, and economic crises. However, there have been few empirical analyses of the effect of the pandemic on individuals’ level of nationalism. Using evidence from two original surveys conducted in Canada in 2019 and 2020, I show that public support for international economic integration has increased rather than decreased since the outbreak of the pandemic. The survey data point to economic anxiety induced by the pandemic as a key mechanism shaping individuals’ attitudes towards international economic integration. While the existing literature has found that negative economic sentiment depresses support for international economic integration, economic anxiety appears to be positively related to support for integration in the COVID-19 era. My findings therefore run counter to current arguments about the effect of the pandemic and to expectations based on the existing literature. Gaining a better empirical understanding of the relationship between the pandemic and nationalism in public opinion is particularly important at a time when international cooperation is needed to address both COVID-19 and its economic effects.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• free trade
• public opinion
• nationalism

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the 2019 Canada Election Study investigators for offering survey space on their study. I am grateful to Alex Dyzenhaus, Naomi Egel, Cameron Mailhot, Tom Pepinsky, and Lindsey Pruett for helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 According to World Bank data, Canada’s trade as percentage of GDP was 65 in 2019, compared to the OECD average of 61 in the same year.

2 In a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, the difference in support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between Democrats and Republicans in the US was approximately 38 percentage points. By contrast, in Canada, there was virtually no difference in support for NAFTA between Conservative Party and Liberal Party supporters. While supporters of the New Democratic Party (NDP) were less likely to support NAFTA, the partisan difference was much smaller than in the US (approximately 13 percentage points) (Stokes 2017).

3 The first survey was administered by Dynata for the Canadian Election Study, and the second survey was administered by Lucid. Both surveys were targeted at the general English-speaking population of Canada.

4 Using exact matching on forward sortation areas (the first three digits of Canadian postal codes) generates similar results (see Table 8 in Appendix D). Forward sortation areas are relatively small geographical units with a median population of less than 20,000.

5 Using the full, unmatched sample yields similar results (see Table 7 in Appendix D).

6 Two versions of the item measuring support for the Trade in Services Agreement (TiSA) were included in the surveys as an experimental manipulation. In both surveys, respondents were randomly assigned one of these two versions. As a result, we should not expect any question wording effects across (rather than within) surveys. See Appendix A for further details.

7 This analysis is based on collecting and reading The Globe and Mail and National Post newspaper articles that include at least one reference to “free trade” between 1 February 2019 and 31 May 2020. Articles referencing free trade constituted approximately 0.6% of all articles published by these two newspapers during this time period, with virtually no difference between the February-September 2019 period (prior to the fielding of the first survey) and the November 2019-May 2020 period (prior to the fielding of the second survey). Articles were collected through Nexis Uni.

8 TiSA is a plurilateral trade treaty that has been under negotiation since 2013. It aims to reduce barriers to cross-border trade in services. There are 23 parties involved in the negotiations, including Canada, the EU, and the US.

9 Support for TiSA ranges from 0 (very bad) to 10 (very good), TiSA economic effect ranges from 0 (very negative effect) to 10 (very positive effect), and support for international rules ranges from 0 (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree).

10 Economic anxiety ranges from 0 (not at all concerned) to 10 (very concerned).

11 Negative economic sentiment captures whether respondents think that the Canadian economy has worsened, stayed the same, or improved over the last year. It ranges from 0 (improved) to 2 (worsened).

12 It should be noted that negative economic sentiment is not identical to economic anxiety: the former is based on a retrospective perception of the economy, while the latter is based on fears about current and future economic implications. However, given the fact that economic concern in general has been associated with lower support for international economic integration, the suggestive evidence that economic anxiety is associated with higher support for international economic integration is still surprising. To guard against the possibility that the discrepancy in findings is an artifact of different sets of respondents for the two surveys, I replicate the analyses presented in Tables 2 and 3 using only the matched portions of the first and second survey, respectively. The results are substantively unchanged (see Tables 12 and 13 in Appendix D).