Public attitudes towards international trade and free trade agreements in the United Kingdom

This article examines attitudes towards international trade in the United Kingdom. Using evidence from two cross-sectional surveys (July 2019 and June 2022), our research allows us to disentangle between citizens’ support for international trade in the abstract and support for specific trade policy in the form of new free trade agreements, and with specific partners. Our findings indicate that overall non-economic and contextual explanations are more relevant to understanding attitudes towards new free trade agreements compared to economic explanations. We point to the context-specific relevance of non-economic explanations, such as identity and partisanship, and show that while the Brexit context has had a major impact on attitude formation, this was also nuanced. Our findings have implications for the study of attitudes towards trade and – more broadly – towards different aspects of globalisation.