Does Social Trust Affect Public Support for International Trade? Insights from an Experiment in Vietnam
| Author | Quynh Nguyen,Thomas Bernauer |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321718773560 |
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321718773560
Political Studies
2019, Vol. 67(2) 440 –458
© The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321718773560
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Does Social Trust Affect
Public Support for
International Trade? Insights
from an Experiment in Vietnam
Quynh Nguyen1,2 and Thomas Bernauer1
Abstract
In view of recent political backlash against various trade agreements, we are interested in
understanding how social trust influences public opinion on international trade. Recent
correlational studies suggest that such an effect might exist, but further research is needed to
establish whether social trust does indeed play a causal role in shaping the mass public’s trade
attitudes. We use an experimental approach to assess whether higher levels of social trust lead to
more public support for free trade. To induce variation in levels of social trust, we expose study
participants to different versions of a voluntary contribution game and examine the effect of such
variation on trade preferences. The experiment was carried out in Vietnam, whose economy has
experienced a rapid process of trade liberalization. We show that our treatment design effectively
induces differing levels of social trust, with higher levels of social trust generating greater support
for free trade.
Keywords
international trade, social trust, public opinion, experimental design
Accepted: 4 April 2018
Recent political backlash against global and regional free trade agreements has raised
major uncertainty about the future of economic globalization. In Britain, citizens voted to
leave the largest trading bloc in the world. Soon after, the unexpected victory of Donald
Trump, who vowed to withdraw from major trade deals, appeared to jeopardize the trad-
ing relationships of the world’s largest economy. The latest elections in France, Germany,
and Austria saw anti-globalization parties garnering more public support than ever before.
According to some commentators, this volatile political scene reflects public anxiety and
insecurity over the process of trade liberalization. A decade earlier, Dani Rodrik (1997)
1Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), Center for Comparative and International Studies,
Zurich, Switzerland
2German Development Institute, Bonn, Germany
Corresponding author:
Quynh Nguyen, Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule Zurich, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
Email: quynh.nguyen@ir.gess.ethz.ch
773560PCX0010.1177/0032321718773560Political StudiesNguyen and Bernauer
research-article2018
Article
Nguyen and Bernauer 441
had already warned of these social and political costs of free trade, predicting that the cost
of greater economic integration would be social disintegration.
The literature on social capital, on which we draw here to address this issue, shows that
trust is important in virtually any social interaction that involves uncertainty. Simmel (1950:
326), for instance, argues that “[t]rust is one of the most important synthetic forces within
society.” Social trust is particularly relevant in the context of international trade where non-
face-to-face interactions are the dominant form of exchange between individuals. Trust in
specific types of actors, such as policymakers or economic institutions, is likely to be rele-
vant for public support for trade policy as well. However, generalized social trust can be
regarded as a more fundamental socio-psychological variable that affects the way people
think about foreign trade. In particular, we argue that individuals with higher levels of gen-
eralized social trust are more likely to support free trade. Previous studies using survey data
to examine the effect of social trust on individuals’ attitudes toward international trade offer
empirical support for the hypothesized positive effect of social trust on public support for
international trade, but the observed correlations do not yet allow for robust causal infer-
ence. This limitation arises from the fact that there is an endogeneity issue when regressing
stated generalized social trust on stated trade preferences.
Fehr (2009: 259), therefore, suggests an experimental setup in which “one treatment
group is induced to have a low level of trust while the subjects in the other treatment
group are induced to have a high level of trust.” In this article, building on research from
behavioral economics and psychology, we implemented an interactive experimental
game. Our findings indicate that by using different versions of a voluntary contribution
game, we can effectively induce significant variation in levels of social trust in partici-
pants. In addition, we show that variation in social trust induced via the experimental
manipulation has the theoretically expected effect on trade policy preferences, thus con-
firming prior correlational results for the trust–trade relationship.
Combining an interactive game with a survey to study social trust effects is novel and
useful for several reasons. First, this approach helps us move from correlational analysis
to causal identification in an experimental setting. It emphasizes the behavioral aspect of
social trust, based on participants’ direct experience of others’ trusting and non-trusting
behaviors. Second, our experimental setting addresses the widespread criticism concern-
ing the artificial setting of laboratory experiments and limited external validity of the
study results. To this end, we employ a population-based sample instead of the standard
approach of recruiting university students. Moreover, we introduce actual material stakes
to create a more authentic setting in which we can observe individual decision-making.
Our empirical work was undertaken in Vietnam, while existing research on trade pref-
erences focuses primarily on advanced industrialized democracies. Given Vietnam’s rela-
tively short experience with market liberalization, it is likely that public opinion on trade
liberalization is still very much in flux. We expect that the latter condition will facilitate
effective experimental manipulations when studying the causal effect of social trust on
trade preferences. In contrast, in advanced industrialized countries where public debate
on trade issues has evolved over decades already, individual trade preferences are likely
to be more stable. Moreover, to establish an appropriate baseline against which to com-
pare correlational to experimental findings, we implemented an observational benchmark
survey based on a representative sample drawn from the population of the five biggest
cities in Vietnam. This means that in addition to extending correlational work on trade
policy preferences to an important developing country, we are able to directly compare
correlational and experimental findings.
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