Political Ideology and Attitudes Towards International Trade – the Case of Ttip

What explains citizens’ attitudes towards the currently negotiated Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union? Previous studies on individual-level attitudes towards free trade have come up with a multitude of explanatory variables based on economic interests, ideology, gender and social trust. Furthermore, former research predominantly uses surveys of general attitudes towards free trade, not opinion polls with regard to particular preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Hence, it remains unclear how these variables perform when citizens are asked about a recent PTA like TTIP.     

Therefore, this paper investigates the effect of both political ideology and traditional political economic factors on individual-level attitudes towards TTIP. Using Eurobarometer data from 28 EU countries, I show that left-right political alignment has a significant and substantive impact on citizens’ assessment of TTIP. I find that individuals with a leftist ideology are significantly more likely to oppose TTIP than individuals with a rightist ideology. Moreover, this effect is strongly mediated by other ideological variables such as attitudes towards globalization. In fact, the effect of ideology on attitudes towards TTIP is significantly stronger for citizens skeptical of globalization and trade in general. In contrast, traditional political economic explanations based on factor endowment, sector-specificity or gender do not show significant effects on public opinion towards TTIP. This paper adds to the existing literature by applying elaborated political economic factors to a recent and politically salient trade agreement.