Does the U.S. congress respond to public opinion on trade?

Lee, Boram ORCID: 0000-0001-8931-8135, Pomirchy, Michael and Schonfeld, Bryan (2023) Does the U.S. congress respond to public opinion on trade? American Politics Research, 51 (6). 731 - 748. ISSN 1532-673X

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Abstract

Are U.S. legislators responsive to public opinion on trade? Despite the prevalence of preference-based approaches to international trade, not much work has directly assessed the relationship between constituency opinion and positioning by members of Congress on trade bills. We assess dynamic responsiveness (whether shifting constituency opinion on trade yields corresponding changes among legislators) by exploiting an original dataset on the positions of members of Congress on the North American Free Trade Agreement at various points leading up to the November 1993 roll-call vote. We find no evidence of dynamic re-sponsiveness to shifting constituency opinion on even a highly salient piece of trade legislation. We provide qualitative evidence that interest group influence may instead be the predominant source of shifting legislator positioning on trade.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	https://journals.sagepub.com/home/APR
Additional Information:	© 2023 The Author(s).
Divisions:	International Relations
Subjects:	J Political Science J Political Science > JZ International relations
Date Deposited:	27 Apr 2023 10:39
Last Modified:	04 Nov 2024 17:03
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/118737

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