Today is a pretty big day in US-China relations with the announcement of a U.S.-Japan agreement on missile defense and massive anti-Japanese demonstrations. On top of this, the U.S. also announced that it will file a WTO case against China on auto exports. There is more than a hint that domestic electoral politics plays a role in this announcement. But will this work? After all, the WTO is relatively obscure to most voters. And how will it be received by the Chinese? Below, McGill assistant professor Krzysztof Pelc uses his research on Google search behavior on WTO cases to tackle these questions (disclosure: I was on Krzysztof’s dissertation committee).
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There is little doubt about the Obama administration’s motivations as it gears up to file at the World Trade Organization against Chinese subsidies on auto exports. With less than two months to the elections, the administration is hoping to credibly convey to import-competing industries that it is willing to spend economic and political resources on defending their interests. Not coincidentally, the announcement of the filing is scheduled to take place in the battleground state of Ohio, a major auto-parts manufacturer.
The question worth asking is whether such actions reach their intended audience and produce the expected political boost. There is reason to be skeptical, as most Americans may know little about the WTO, or the functioning of its dispute settlement body. The public salience of trade agreements has been thrown in doubt in the past (Guisinger 2009).
For the same reasons, we can question whether constituents care when their country is in the defendant seat, being accused of violating its treaty commitments on trade. This too is a highly current question, as hours after the US announcement this morning (the timing suggesting that this is too rapid to be a countersuit, and is more likely coincidental) China formally initiated a dispute against US countervailing and antidumping measures on a wide range of products.
Most contemporary theories accounting for why states enter into international commitments rest on the answer to both questions being yes (see Mansfield Milner and Rosendorff 2002 in the case of trade, and Simmons and Danner 2010 in the case of the ICC). And yet, we have little way of knowing one way or the other. Surveys can provide some answers, yet they too run into difficulties when faced with respondent ignorance over technical issues, which makes surveys vulnerable to noise and framing effects.
In a paper forthcoming in International Organization, I tackle these questions by turning to Google search engine data, looking at variation in WTO-related searches across time and space. The premise behind this approach is that while constituents may not be perfectly informed about the workings of the WTO, if they care sufficiently about their government being accused of breaking its commitments, or conversely, challenging the violations of its trade partners, they will expend efforts to seek related information.
Web search data have recently been fruitfully exploited in public health research, to predict outbreaks of diseases ranging from influenza to kidney stone incidence; these data may be of equal value to political economists, as they are well-adapted to assessing many of the otherwise untestable behavioral assumptions underlying our models.
While I find strong evidence that American constituents react significantly to their government being filed against by seeking WTO-related information, the evidence for American reactions to filings by the US is weaker, and more mixed. I also examine how material interests figure into the equation, weighing geographical regions by the commercial stake they hold in a given dispute, as proxied by employment. The resulting findings might give the Obama administration further pause. While there is little evidence that material interest magnify the reaction to US filings against trade partners, we see a significant boost in information-seeking among individuals living in regions with trade at stake when the US is the one being challenged. The implication is that if Chinese constituents mirror Americans’ behavior, the filing against auto subsidies may have the unintended consequence of “awakening” precisely those domestic groups most likely to oppose swift Chinese compliance.
The paper’s final finding may be more worrying still. While on average, US constituents react strongly to alleged trade violations by their government, this is not at all the case for so-called non-merchandise disputes, which concern often opaque domestic legislation over e.g. patent enforcement or the handling of trade remedy investigations. Non-merchandise disputes result in no increased information-seeking, regardless of which side of the dispute the US is on, suggesting that in these cases the informational gap may simply be too wide. This finding further bolsters the claim that democracies tend to channel their violations towards opaque policies, given how complexity can play an obfuscating function (Kono 2006).
Guisinger, A. 2009. “Determining Trade Policy: Do Voters Hold Politicians Accountable?” International Organization 63(3):533–57.
Kono, D.Y. 2006. “Optimal obfuscation: Democracy and trade policy transparency.” American Political Science Review 100(03):369–384.
Mansfield, Edward D., Helen V. Milner and B. Peter Rosendorff. 2002. “Why Democracies Coop- erate More: Electoral Control and International Trade Agreements.” International Organization 56:477–514.
Simmons, Beth A. and Allison Danner. 2010. “Credible Commitments and the International Criminal Court.” International Organization 64:225–256.