US Public and Economic Coercion: A Constrained Choice Experiment

Dawid Walentek

Ghent University

dawid.walentek@ugent.be

• Economic coercion is a hot topic
• Inconsistent polls

Mixed feelings

Literature

• Economic coercion is on a rise
• More economic tools used to pursue political goals
• Protectionist demands and expectations of an active foreign policy
• Limited insights on the domestic preferences for economic coercion

Research Questions

• How much is the US public willing to pay for economic coercion?
  • Does the economic effect on the target state have a moderating role?
• Does the tool of economic coercion influence support?
• Does the relation with the target state affect public preferences?

Experimental design

• Constrained choice experiment (Hix et al., 2021)
• Four experimental groups (China/Canada & sanctions/tariffs)
• Five stages of the experiment
  • Information and active consent
  • Introduction
  • Unconstrained experiment
  • Constrained experiment
  • Questionnaire (General Social Survey)
• 1,000 US-based respondents
• ​Registered Report

Visualisation

Visualisation

Simulation

• Current design is robust and allows to identify:
• • information effect (constrain)
  • direct effect (country or policy)
  • direct effects in tandem (country and policy)
  • interaction effect (country and policy specific combination
  • subgroup analysis (gender, education, ideology, last election, employment situation)
  • Overview of distributions of preferences

Pushing the envelope forward

• Playing at the home crowd
• Undoing the liberal order
• Future of economic coercion

Thank you