Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: A Dynamic Theory of Mass Preferences for Trade

这项研究调查了有关公众对贸易政策的态度的重要问题。贸易政策的变化导致消费品价格水平的变化。当贸易政策放开时，主要消费进口或与进口竞争的商品的人因这些商品的价格下降而受益，而消费可出口商品的人则因价格上涨而蒙受损失。由于消费模式随着收入的变化而变化，贸易政策变化对消费者价格的影响是分配的。目前关于大规模贸易优惠的研究几乎完全集中在贸易政策变化的潜在收入和/或就业影响上，忽视了这些价格影响。这个项目探索了贸易政策中的价格水平效应如何决定个人层面的贸易政策偏好，使用了一项对美国公众进行的具有全国代表性的调查，并进行了几个嵌入式调查实验，以检验贸易优惠的动态模型。该项目还包括对美国经济政策制定者的采访，以更好地了解公众对经济状况变化的反应如何影响决策过程。知识优势：关于全球化的大众偏好的文献侧重于贸易政策的问题领域以及贸易政策的潜在收入或就业影响。尽管有许多研究，但对于公众在多大程度上对外国经济政策有稳定和一致的偏好，人们相对较少达成共识。这项研究增强了现有的贸易政治经济学模型，使个人能够同时关注贸易政策变化对收入和价格水平的影响。该项目提供了一种假设的机制，通过这种机制，个人可以相互权衡这些影响：感知到的经济不安全感。当感受到的不安全感相对较高时，个人会倾向于采取保护其就业和/或收入的政策，从而“退回到安全地带”。然而，当经济不安全感相对较低时，个人更有可能支持贸易政策，使他们大量消费的商品成本相对较低。在这个贸易优惠的动态模型下，本研究致力于解决近年来贸易政策文献中的一个关键争论，并帮助理解弥漫在这一主题的现有文献中的相互矛盾的结果。更广泛的影响：这项研究对公共政策具有明确和直接的影响。加深对美国公民如何在日益全球化的经济中权衡生活成本和利益的理解，对于制定最大限度地提高社会福利的政策至关重要。借鉴贸易政策制定的“以保护换销售”模式，贸易政策文献往往假设在贸易政策形成和其他外交经济政策领域存在民主赤字。通过关注贸易政策变化对分配价格水平的影响，这项研究将评估这种民主赤字是否像之前假设的那样大。

The research investigates important questions about public attitudes toward trade policy. Changes in trade policy lead to changes in price levels of consumer goods. When trade policy is liberalized, people who primarily consume imported or import-competing goods benefit because of decreases in prices for those goods, while people who consume exportable goods lose due to increases in prices. Because consumption patterns vary with income, the consumer price effects of changes in trade policy are distributional. The current research on mass trade preferences - focused almost exclusively on the potential income and/or employment effects of changes in trade policy - ignores these price effects. This project explores how price level effects in trade policy determine trade policy preferences at the individual level, using a nationally representative survey of the U.S. public with several embedded survey experiments to test the dynamic model of trade preferences. The project also includes interviews with U.S. economic policy-makers to better understand how the public's reaction to changes in economic conditions influences the policy-making process. Intellectual Merits: The literature on mass preferences for globalization has focused on the issue area of trade policy and the potential income or employment effects of trade policy. Despite numerous studies, there is relatively little consensus on the extent to which the public has stable and coherent preferences over foreign economic policies. This research augments existing political economy models of trade to allow individuals to be concerned with both income and price level effects of changes in trade policy. The project provides a hypothesized mechanism through which individuals weigh these effects against each other: perceived economic insecurity. When perceived insecurity is relatively high, individuals "retreat to safety" by preferring policies that safeguard their employment and/or income. When economic insecurity is relatively low, however, individuals are more likely to favor trade policies that make the goods that they consume heavily relatively less costly. With this dynamic model of trade preferences, this research works to resolve one of the key debates in the trade policy literature in recent years and help make sense of the conflicting results that pervade the existing literature on this topic. Broader Impacts: The research has clear and direct implications for public policy. Developing a strong understanding of how American citizens weigh the costs and benefits of living in an increasingly globalized economy is important for designing policies that maximize social welfare. Drawing on "protection for sale" models of trade policy creation, the trade policy literature often assumes that a democratic deficit exists in trade policy formation and other foreign economic policy areas. By focusing on distributional price level effects of changes in trade policy, the research will assess if this democratic deficit is as large as previously assumed.