Replication Data for: Great Expectations: The Democratic Advantage in Trade Attitudes

Why is trade with some countries more popular than with others? Linking the literature on regime type and trade cooperation with the literature on trade attitudes, we argue that the domestic political institutions and cooperative reputations of foreign states condition the willingness of the public and policy elites to deepen trade cooperation. Using survey experiments fielded on the American public and a unique sample of U.S. foreign economic policymakers, we show that respondents prefer trade with democracies over trade with non-democracies by large margins. Further, we find that this democratic advantage stems from a strong expectation that democracies will make for more reliable and consistent cooperation partners. This study provides one of the first direct and causally identified tests of the mechanisms underlying theories of the political economy of regime type and international cooperation. While we focus on the case of trade attitudes, our argument is general, suggesting that support for cooperation in other issue areas is conditional on similar factors.为何与部分国家开展贸易比与其他国家更受青睐？本文将政体类型与贸易合作相关研究、贸易态度相关研究加以整合，提出核心论点：外国的国内政治制度与合作声誉，会影响公众与政策精英深化贸易合作的意愿。本研究针对美国公众开展了调查实验，并选取了独特的美国对外经济政策制定者样本，结果显示受访者显著更倾向于与民主国家开展贸易，而非非民主国家。进一步研究发现，这种民主国家优势源于公众强烈的预期——民主国家会成为更可靠、更稳定的合作伙伴。本研究是首批直接开展因果识别检验、验证政体类型与国际合作政治经济学理论背后运行机制的研究之一。尽管本文聚焦于贸易态度这一具体案例，但核心论点具有普适性，表明其他议题领域的合作支持度同样取决于类似因素。