Compass Money: Dr. Alexandra Guisinger Talks Race & Protectionism at Georgetown GPEP Event

The Global Political Economy Project (GPEP) held the first of a series of talks discussing the topic of Race in International Political Economy on October 1. The talk, “Race and Trade Politics,” featured Dr. Alexandra Guisinger of Temple University and was moderated by Professor Kathleen McNamara of Georgetown University.

Dr. Guisinger researches how and when voters form opinions, and she also researches racial and gender-based protectionist sentiments. She opened the discussion by explaining that trade is “not something [Americans] feel personally affected by, which allows for a lot of openness in their opinions.” This “openness” is incredibly important, she said, especially when you consider how inaccurate information shapes voter perceptions.

For example, Dr. Guisinger explained, when voters are informed that our largest trading partner is Canada, not China (as 60 percent of respondents believed), support for protectionist trade policies decrease significantly. Unfortunately, Dr. Guisinger argues, politicians have an incentive to continue with their anti-China rhetoric. “If they want to mobilize voters, that works,” Dr. Guisinger said. “And I don’t see an end to that, because that’s a successful strategy.”

Dr. Guisinger continued by discussing our perception of what kind of worker is hurt by trade. She argued that there is a common perception that white men who work in manufacturing are the ones most hurt by trade—and that this perception affects whether or not we support protectionist trade policies. 

To demonstrate this, Dr. Guisinger showed an experiment she ran. In the experiment, she presented a representative sample of the American electorate with different trade-related articles, and then asked them about their opinion on trade. The articles all had the same protectionist message, except that the races of the people in the articles were different. She found that support for protectionism was highest when people were shown an article depicting white people, and lowest when shown an article depicting Black people.

This difference in popular support is extremely important because trade is a fundamentally redistributive enterprise. “When we put in trade protection, it benefits some people’s jobs over other people’s jobs,” said Dr. Guisinger. 

Dr. Guisinger argued that part of the reason Americans are more favorable towards protectionist trade policies than welfare programs or increases in the minimum wage is because of a perception of who these policies help. Protectionist trade policies are perceived to help white, male manufacturers, while welfare is perceived to primarily help Black Americans and women. “By this focus on white working men,” Dr. Guisinger explained, “we ignore policies that might make the globalized world a place that [African Americans and women] can thrive in.”