What do Americans think about international trade? On what basis do they form their opinions? Do their opinions differ by gender? By race? Do their opinions matter politically? Can they be changed by the provision of information new to them? How do politicians respond to this information environment? In this complex book, Alexandra Guisinger takes a detailed empirical and theoretical look at these questions.
What does she find? Her model, presented both formally and informally, is that citizens’ views of trade reflect how they perceive three things: trade’s impact on themselves as individuals, on their community, and on the nation as a whole. Globalization has made it increasingly hard for them to see its impact on themselves, or even on their communities. They therefore base their opinions more on what they believe are community and nationwide effects. Using her language, “sociotropic employment concerns are almost twice as influential as individual employment concerns on trade policy opinion,” whether the former are “measured by regional concerns or national concerns” (p. 63). Consistent with this perceived lack of direct impact on their own lives, Americans are less informed on this issue than on many others, such as taxes or abortion. And trade matters less to them when they go to the polls. Hence, the subtitle of American Opinion on Trade, “preferences without politics.” But on balance, citizens lean protectionist, seeing trade’s costs more than its benefits. Negative media framing of trade episodes, which Guisinger documents, is an important contributor to their opinions.
Over the past half century, U.S. trade exposure has increased markedly, but economic restructuring has “diminish[ed] the number of small communities reliant on one or a handful of manufacturing facilities” (p. 21). So paradoxically, she argues, Americans care less about trade than they used to and political coalitions, whether free trade or protectionist, are harder to build and maintain. Population groups that are relatively more protectionist—women, nonwhites—care much more about other issues. Politicians therefore are, for the most part, free to support established free-trade policies independent of constituent opinion. But they also have the incentive to minimize public discourse.
Can positive factual information about trade change opinions? Yes, Guisinger concludes, to some degree. In one of several tests, she documents this through surveys where a “treatment group” is provided with such information and a “control group” is not. Asked the same question, the treatment group is then more positive about the effects of trade liberalization. And white men are particularly responsive to new information in reframing their opinions in a free-trade direction. But, she argues, while a politician making prominent pro-trade arguments in the public arena may shift people’s views, he or she will simultaneously increase the salience of trade as a campaign issue, without changing opinion enough to reverse the general disposition toward protectionism. This would likely work to the politician’s net disadvantage at the polls. Understandably, few undertake this challenge. And given trade’s low salience, they do not need to. They can continue to reflect elite opinion, which many of them share, and support trade liberalization.
The author’s analysis is grounded in detailed research and is pathbreaking in important respects. Her care and creativity in developing a broad range of survey instruments and analyzing the results is admirable; it is hard to do it justice within the space allotted here. Overall, this reviewer finds this book to be as sophisticated and detailed a presentation and analysis of American opinion on trade as he has read in his 45 years of exposure to the subject.
Guisinger’s treatment of American trade politics is not always so sophisticated, however. For example, she writes early in the book that in 2005, “the US Senate scrambled (but ultimately failed) to impose 27.5 percent tariffs on Chinese goods” (p. 16). In fact, this “scramble” consisted of one procedural vote in one house of Congress clearly staged to send a message to the Bush administration to put more pressure on the Chinese government to up the value of its currency, the renminbi. There was never a serious threat of actual enactment, and the cosponsors—Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC)—do not seem to have viewed that as a serious prospect.
More surprising, perhaps, in a book highlighting politicians’ aversion to public engagement on trade issues, is the scant treatment given to the decade when congressionally initiated trade action was at its peak. This decade was the 1980s, when, driven by a surge in the value of the dollar, America’s global trade deficit exploded and the Reagan administration was slow to respond. House Speaker Tip O’Neill could declare in 1985: “Based on what I hear from members in the cloak room, trade is the number one issue” (quoted in the Washingon Post, 19 September 1985, and in I. M. Destler. American Trade Politics, 2005, p. 89). Frustration and activism were bipartisan, though Democrats were also happy to run with an issue on which they could label President Reagan both insensitive and weak.
Throughout the 99th and 100th Congresses, senators and representatives worked on what became the massive Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988, the first (and, to date, only) major U.S. trade law since the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 that came primarily from congressional initiative. The Reagan administration played catch-up throughout. But during this period, the dollar declined, exports surged, and the most protectionist of the provisions in the bill were removed or modified. And in the decades that followed, legislators’ trade activism receded. Those later decades receive much more detailed treatment in the Guisinger book.
One of the “hazards of academic publishing,” writes the author, “is the long delay between a manuscript being finished and appearing in print.” Hence, the scholars can “find their work has been superseded or even flatly contradicted by contemporary events” (p. 258). Is Guisinger’s argument about the disincentives for making trade a prominent campaign issue refuted by the success of Donald Trump (and that of Bernie Sanders)? Her surveys found men to be more pro-trade than women, and whites more so than blacks. Yet Trump succeeded in exploiting import anxieties among a substantial subgroup of white males in trade-impacted states.
Guisinger confronts this challenge directly in her concluding chapter, noting that the two men who brought trade policy into the central political discourse were not mainstream politicians, but outsiders. She notes further that Trump’s impact in using the trade issue was particularly concentrated in one subgroup identified in her chapter about racial diversity: “white males influenced by racial considerations of redistribution.” Nonetheless, she admits that in linking trade protectionism to identity politics, “Donald Trump far exceeded my imagination” (p. 265).
On this and other matters Trumpian, Guisinger is anything but alone. In the immediate future, protectionist sentiments and policies seem to have the upper hand. But in raising the salience of trade policy, Trump has brought the media to highlighting the negative responses to his actions at home and abroad—from Republican legislators in particular. Trump’s tariffs also appear to be bringing pro-trade actors out of the shadows where they have long been comfortably residing. This could, over time, move the public—and the media, and the political community—toward a posture more supportive of trade liberalization.
Like much recent writing on policy and political matters, American Opinion on Trade is challenged by the current American political scene. But Guisinger’s work remains important and relevant.
