How do people form their opinions about trade policy?

Bruce Blonigen of the University of Oregon has some New Evidence on the Formation of Trade Policy Preferences (free - and somewhat different - October 2008 version here).

There are several conclusions:

First, information acquisition by individuals on policy matters is potentially costly and the data suggest that many do not feel sufficiently informed to state an opinion on trade policy. These
“uninformed” individuals are systematically those with less education and income, and I show
that this can explain why trade policy outcomes may be non-linear in skills (with low-skill and
high-skill have lower preferences for trade protection than medium-skill workers), even though
freer trade may be progressively more harmful to one’s income the lower skill one has.

Second, I show that the life-cycle change surrounding retirement has significant impacts on individuals’ stated trade policy preferences, lowering the likelihood that an individual will acquire informationon trade policies, and fully mitigating any effects of skill or industry trade exposure effects on an individuals’ preferences for trade protection. Thus, the evidence in this paper suggests that future political economy modeling of trade policy outcomes will need to incorporate these features to obtain realistic predictions of trade policy formation.

Another contribution of the paper is to show that both an individual’s skills and the trade exposure of their occupation industry matter, which contrasts with the Scheve and Slaughter (2001) study using these same ANES data, and which suggests that workers are neither freely mobile nor freely immobile in their ability to switch occupation industries.

A final result is the puzzlingly large impact of gender on trade policy preferences. This
paper confirms that women are much more likely to favor trade protection, as also found in
Beaulieu and Napier (2008). But it also documents that women are much more likely to be
uninformed about policy matters. Unlike the other results in this paper, there are no clear
theoretical reasons for why such large gender differences exist on the topic of trade policy.