Is context pretext? Institutionalized commitments and the situational politics of foreign economic policy

Abstract

Does the public care if their leaders fail to uphold or comply with their country’s standing international commitments? If so, under what conditions? I study this question in the context of attitudes toward institutionalized trade cooperation. Using survey experiments, I find that the public has a pronounced taste for compliance that is largely independent of the underlying political and economic context. The public is less willing to endorse the imposition of trade restrictions when doing so would violate standing trade agreements. This is the case even in contexts where the public would otherwise support protectionist policy: when the unemployment rate is high, when there are a large number of jobs at stake, and when the trade partner has recently failed to honor their own trade commitments. I find little in the way of copartisanship dynamics, but document strong dispositional effects in which those not predisposed to view international cooperation in a positive light impose systematically smaller punishments on leaders who violate treaty commitments.