Subtle Changes – Sambassadeur
I meant to write about this a few days ago but then it slipped my mind. But it’s not really time sensitive, so perhaps it’s worth saying anyways.
The latest New York Times/CBS poll had a question about support for free trade. I initially saw it reported (unfortunately I can’t remember where to link to) just in terms of the baseline result, something to the effect of: “60 percent of Americans support restrictions on free trade.” Phrased that way, it sounds pretty extreme. People are really worried about the economy and expressing it through a (potentially very legitimate) distrust of free trade.
However, once you actually look at the question, it suggests something very different. The exact wording is as follows: “Which of the following statements comes closer to your opinion – trade restrictions are necessary to protect domestic industries, OR free trade must be allowed, even if domestic industries are hurt by foreign competition?”
Is it really that surprising that the results came out strongly in favor of protection? If you state clearly the potential harm of an approach without suggesting that it will produce any positive gain, OBVIOUSLY people will tend to distrust it. Given that “free trade” is such a vague concept anyways, it’s perfectly reasonable for people to adopt the cues in the question and answer accordingly.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with that per se. There’s no such thing as a perfectly objective question, so it’s pointless to ask for one. The problem starts when questions like these are referenced second and third-hand to support sweeping claims that are not backed by the data. To take that poll response and conclude “Americans are against free trade” for example would be quite silly.
One thing that helps militate against that sort of misuse is that they’ve got quite a bit of context for these results – in the form of responses going back 20 years to the very same question. And what’s most amazing about that is the relative stability of public attitudes. It was 56/34 in 1988, only a few points off the current ratio of 60/28. Last spring was actually the high water mark for the protectionist side (68/24), but things have actually declined significantly since then.
And over the 20 years, things have generally held pretty close to a 60/30 margin, leaning a few points in either direction but not moving all that much.
All of which is a long way of saying that the simple story of “economic trouble provokes protectionism” might deserve some re-thinking. At least, not this time around. The early 90s recession did, however, seem to cause a relatively large re-evaluation, which supports the general perception that Perot’s candidacy tapped into a rising sentiment about the “giant sucking sound” to the south. Still, a 10 point swing may be significant but it still suggests that there’s a relatively stable consensus on this question with a great deal of durability. In the same vein, it doesn’t seem obvious that an economic boom does much either. Attitudes didn’t noticeably change throughout the 90s.
All of which is to say: politics is often about the margins. We like to think in grand terms about major changes. And we like to imagine that each election is a sweeping referendum on an entire boat of ideas and attitudes. However, generally speaking the public seems to move sluggishly – if at all. We have a partisan system which means that a relatively small change in the voting patterns (say, 5%) is sufficient to radically alter the executive’s agenda.
Of course, due to countermajoritarian institutions like the Senate, those changes often end up being a lot less radical than you might expect. Whether you think that’s good or bad is a subject for another day.