Framing preferences on international trade law

Speaker: Professor Anne van Aaken (University of Hamburg)
Chair: Dr Mona Paulsen (LSE)

Preferences of citizens have been found to be important for understanding why states comply with international law and can also be assumed to be relevant for the making of international law, including trade law. But understanding trade preferences remains elusive. Rationalist theories, grounded in political economy of trade, explain trade preferences through a cost-benefit analysis of voters assuming that certain issues, like jobs, matter to voters. Behavioural approaches have focused on personality traits, fairness considerations and loss frames. Yet, all approaches have failed to consider the first step in the formation of trade preferences, namely, whether trade issues are salient for voters and how they are framed in elite discourse. We fill this gap by disentangling the many issues, such as labour, environment, and security, often present trade discussions, as well as the tone with which they are discussed. Using a text-as-data approach, we analyzed thousands of parliamentary debate records and opinion articles mentioning trade from mid 20^th century until today in 6 different countries to understand the dynamics of the trade discourse across space and time.

This seminar is organised by the Public International Law Research Hub