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Category: Project

Description: How to reduce public opposition to international trade? Despite a large literature trade preference formation, efforts to identify political communication strategies to promote public support for trade are at best nascent. I argue that the following strategy will be effective in the US: providing information to citizens about how trade benefits employment or exports/imports in their country, particularly in the agricultural and manufacturing sectors. This is because while Americans tend to hold sociotropic perceptions of trade, they often lack the economic literacy to understand the aggregate impacts of trade on their national ingroups. The effectiveness of information provision is reinforced by emphasizing trade's impacts on jobs and exports/imports in agriculture and manufacturing, since Americans often evaluate trade through the lens of employment, fairness, and the distribution of gains. I design an information provision experiment—based on a nationally-representative American sample (n = 1,000)—to test my argument. This pre-analysis plan details the theoretical framework and corresponding hypotheses, and preregisters the experimental design and estimation strategies.