Title: Prejudice and Protectionism
Description: What explains public opinion toward economic globalization, and specifically, toward international trade? A wave of recent scholarship has shown that symbolic and identity-based factors--individual predispositions such as ethnocentrism, nationalism, prejudice, and cosmopolitanism--are highly correlated with attitudes toward trade. The nature of the relationship between symbolic attitudes and trade opinion, however, remains conspicuously unclear. This dissertation combines fresh empirical strategies with the theoretical tools of both economics and psychology to illuminate the role and effect of non-material factors in the formation of public opinion toward international trade. I present a new theoretical framework for the study of individual preferences in international political economy, and test the empirical implications of the theory using observational data, an original survey experiment, and systematic analysis of open-ended survey responses. Specifically, I show: (1) that symbolic attitudes such a prejudice have a causal effect on trade preferences, independent of economic considerations; (2) that the effect of economic self-interest on trade preferences is contingent upon the strength of symbolic attitudes; and (3) that the trade preferences of cosmopolitan individuals are susceptible to the effect of subjective beliefs about the impact of trade on foreigners, providing the first evidence of foreign-regarding motivations in the context of trade opinion.