How Americans think about trade: Reconciling conflicts among money, power,and principles

Trade has again emerged as a controversial issue in America, yet we know li ttle about the ideas that guide American thinking on these questions. By co mbining traditional survey methods with experimental manipulation of proble m content, this study explores the ideational landscape among elite America ns and pays particular attention to how elite Americans combine their ideas about commerce with their ideas about national security and social justice . We find that most American leaders think like intuitive neoclassical econ omists and that only a minority think along intuitive neorealist or Rawlsia n lines. Among the mass public, in contrast, a majority make judgments like intuitive neorealists and intuitive Rawlsians. Although elite respondents see international institutions as promising vehicles in principle, in pract ice they favor exploiting America's advantage in bilateral bargaining power over granting authority to the World Trade Organization. The distribution of these ideas in;America is not arrayed neatly along traditional ideologic al divisions. To understand the ideational landscape, it is necessary to id entify how distinctive mental models-mercantilist, neorealist, egalitarian, and neoclassical economic-sensitize or desensitize people to particular as pects of geopolitical problems, an approach we call cognitive interactionis m.