Environmental concern leads to trade skepticism on the political left and right

Abstract

Evermore apparent environmental impacts of vastly increased international trade have been met both by public backlash against further trade liberalization and by efforts at greening international trade. Because public support is essential to environmental and trade policy-making alike, we examine the trade-environment nexus from a public opinion perspective. Our focus lies on whether negative attitudes towards trade are fueled by concern over its environmental consequences. We argue that environmental concern affects how citizens evaluate the costs and benefits of international trade, and that such evaluation is moderated by political ideology. The empirical analysis relies on a population-based survey experiment and a large representative survey in a small open economy, Switzerland. The results show that environmental concern (serenity) leads to decreasing (increasing) appreciation of and support for international trade. Political beliefs (ideology) moderate these effects, resulting in different manifestations of trade skepticism on the political right and left. Another interesting finding given the increasingly salient debate over environmental footprints of consumption and pollution havens is that we do not find evidence for the presumption that citizens care more about environmental damage at home than abroad when forming trade policy preferences. The main policy implication of our findings is that policy-makers should assign high priority to green global supply chains if they wish to sustain public support for liberal international trade policy.

Public Demand for Extraterritorial Environmental and Social Public Goods Provision

“…That being said, we expect substantial variation in the value that citizens derive from regulation of Q abroad, depending on their general concern for the environment and social issues (Rudolph, Kolcava and Bernauer 2022;Rudolph et al 2020b). A critical pathway linking such concern to demand for Q is via problem perception.…”

“…In particular, we speak to the current literature on the moral and economic bases of foreign policy preference formation (Bechtel, Genovese and Scheve 2019;Bechtel, Hainmueller and Margalit 2014;Kertzer et al 2014;Rudolph et al 2020b;Tomz and Weeks 2020). First, due to its clear juxtaposition of domestic costs and foreign benefits, our research contributes evidence on how citizens weigh economic costs and non-economic gains, showing that citizens care for social and environmental conditions of production abroad.…”

Could Closing the Knowledge Gap Help in Reducing Global Environmental Impacts of Local Consumption?

“…In addition, as 2 This becomes apparent in our pre-treatment data: 50% of respondents with a high education level correctly perceive footprints to primarily accrue abroad compared to only 31% of respondents with a low education level. With respect to income, 43% of respondents with an income in the highest income quartile perceive environmental impacts to primarily accrue abroad compared to 34% of respondents with a an income in the lowest quartile (Rudolph et al 2021).…”

“…It is worth noting that comparable research on information effects in environmental policy-making, which focuses mostly on climate change (Walsh and Tsurusaki 2014; 1 These figures are from a pre-treatment wave of the Swiss Environmental Panel survey whose data we use for the empirical analysis in this paper (Rudolph et al 2021). Malka, Krosnick and Langer 2009), arrives at inconclusive findings on this matter.…”