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About the project

Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) form a key priority of the government’s post-Brexit economic policy (HM Treasury 2020). Yet, little attention has been paid to the democratic underpinnings of these agreements. This oversight is problematic because FTAs have important distributional implications, e.g. for living standards, wages and rights. The benefits of trade tend to be unequal across the population and the costs are often concentrated within specific groups, usually the lower skilled and less-mobile workers (Milner 1999).

Brexit also revealed a growing anti-globalisation sentiment with societal groups – often referred to as the ‘losers of globalisation’ – expressing concerns about the global economic model and immigration (Hobolt 2016). If Brexit can be understood as -partly- a backlash against globalisation, then it is important to ask whether inequalities and citizens’ concerns that led to Brexit are being reproduced in their preferences towards other international agreements, including FTAs, thus further consolidating and perpetuating existing divisions and inequalities.

 Our research aims to understand citizen’s preferences on trade. It has implications for trade policy, allowing for the effective engagement with stakeholders interested in how differing views on trade can be represented in the policy-making process. Therefore, it will help to promote inclusion and accountability in policy making. This is important because concerns have been raised that trade policy has lacked scrutiny, threatens social rights and fails to align with international objectives (e.g. sustainable development) (Trade Justice Movement 2020).

The project engages with debates in comparative politics, political theory and international political economy to understand the core drivers of public attitudes towards FTAs. It asks:

• How does the UK public view the government’s trade policy and specific FTAs?
• In what ways does inequality influence individuals’ trade preferences? i.e. do people in regions with high levels of different types of inequality have different views on FTAs?
• Does the backlash against the EU spill over into individuals’ trade preferences? i.e. are these two issues correlated and, if so, under what conditions?

The proposed research will use survey methods to answer these questions. On the one hand, the project focuses on the role of ‘new’ divisions resulting from socio-demographic developments which have given rise to inequality: educational expansion, ageing societies and geographic polarization (e.g. Ford and Jennings 2019). These developments were evidenced by the Brexit referendum result, which was driven by low-educated, older individuals, living in deprived areas (Curtice 2017), i.e. individuals that may be considered vulnerable and with limited opportunities (the so-called ‘losers of globalisation’). Yet, FTAs, could expose these groups to more vulnerability and exacerbate existing inequalities among low-skilled workers. Such tendencies are likely to be amplified within the uncertain context of COVID-19 which resulted in notable falls in exports and rising levels of unemployment and job insecurity (ONS 2020). Therefore we ask whether this constituency opposes FTAs in line with their socio-economic priors, such an effect is more likely if their voices do not feed into the policy process.

On the other hand, our research aims to disentangle individuals’ attitudes towards Brexit from their attitudes towards trade. We ask if there has been a Brexit-fueled polarisation of public trade preferences. Support for Brexit has been higher in regions economically displaced by globalization (Colantone and Stanig 2018). Does this carry over into support for the government’s ‘Global Britain’ agenda? Brexit has come to symbolise sharp divisions within the UK, which have consolidated into newly salient identities: ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’ that cut across traditional party lines (Hobolt et al. 2020). We ask how Brexit identities relate to preferences on FTAs. For instance, if persuaded by the Leave narrative, do voters (e.g. in the Conservative Party’s new ‘blue wall’ seats) go against their priors and support FTAs as a tool to ‘take back control’?