Macdonald David
Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA.
Polit Behav. 2023 Jan 23:1-19. doi: 10.1007/s11109-023-09858-x.
Debates over trade liberalization vs. protectionism have becoming increasingly relevant as the world moves through a contentious era of economic globalization. This is particularly true in the United States, where an elite consensus on the merits of free trade has fractured in recent years. While we know a good deal about the economic and cultural determinants of trade opinion, we know little about how attitudes toward government may matter. Here, I address this oversight by examining the relationship between political trust and trade support. I do this with cross-sectional and panel data from the American National Election Studies (ANES) and the National Annenberg Election Surveys (NAES), and a survey experiment fielded through Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk). Overall, I find that there is a positive and substantively significant relationship between political trust and mass support for free and open "pro-trade" policies. I attribute this to greater citizen confidence that government will pursue trade deals in the national interest and mitigate any perceived risks associated with free trade. These findings help us to better understand the determinants of public opinion toward trade policy and underscore the consequences of political trust.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11109-023-09858-x.
随着世界步入经济全球化的争议时代，关于贸易自由化与保护主义的辩论变得愈发重要。在美国尤其如此，近年来，关于自由贸易优点的精英共识已然破裂。虽然我们对贸易观点的经济和文化决定因素了解颇多，但对于对政府的态度可能产生何种影响却知之甚少。在此，我通过研究政治信任与贸易支持之间的关系来弥补这一疏漏。我使用了来自美国全国选举研究（ANES）和全国安嫩伯格选举调查（NAES）的横截面数据和面板数据，以及通过亚马逊的土耳其机器人（MTurk）进行的一项调查实验来开展此项研究。总体而言，我发现政治信任与民众对自由开放的“支持贸易”政策的支持之间存在积极且具有实质意义的关系。我将此归因于公民更有信心认为政府会为了国家利益推行贸易协定，并减轻与自由贸易相关的任何可感知风险。这些发现有助于我们更好地理解公众对贸易政策观点的决定因素，并凸显政治信任的后果。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s11109-023-09858-x获取的补充材料。
