Reacting to the politicization of trade policy

Abstract

How do actors react to the politicisation of trade policy? This special issue aims to tackle this question, considering a broad set of actors including members of parliament, political parties, regional and national governments, interest groups, and the European Commission. To set the stage for the contributions to the special issue, in this introduction, we first conceptualise politicisation as the combination of high salience and high contestation. We then present existing research on the politicisation of trade policy, highlighting the relative scarcity of work on reactions to politicisation. The introduction also offers a typology of strategies available to actors in response to politicisation, which distinguishes between dodging, free riding, confronting, and bandwagoning. These strategies differ with respect to the position taken by actors relative to contestation and by their level of activity. Finally, we summarise the main lessons learned from the special issue.