Attitudes towards the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership in the European Union: The treaty partner heuristic and issue attention

Why has the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partisanship met with strong public resistance among some Europeans and in some European Union member states, but not in others? This article argues that one important perspective to explain the pattern of support for TTIP is the role of heuristic opini...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEuropean Union politics Vol. 19; no. 2; pp. 255 - 277
Main Author Steiner, Nils D
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published London, England SAGE Publications 01.06.2018
Sage Publications Ltd
Subjects
Attitudes
Citizens
Heuristic
Investments
Partisanship
Partnerships
Resistance
Trade agreements
Trade policy
Treaties
Transatlantic
preferential trade agreements
Trade and Investment Partnership
issue attention
Heuristics
trade attitudes
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Summary:Why has the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partisanship met with strong public resistance among some Europeans and in some European Union member states, but not in others? This article argues that one important perspective to explain the pattern of support for TTIP is the role of heuristic opinion formation and issue attention. Analysing multiple waves of Eurobarometer data, I find that views of the two treaty partners, the US and the European Union, shape attitudes towards TTIP and that the largely post-materialist concerns over TTIP resonated specifically in those European countries whose citizens’ attention was less focused on economic issues. In showing how opinions towards concrete real-world trade policy proposals are shaped by the political context, these findings complement previous research on citizens’ general stances towards trade.
ISSN:1465-1165
1741-2757
DOI:10.1177/1465116518755953