Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Scholars have shown that the ways in which beneficiaries of policies are portrayed by elites have an important impact on the preferences of the public regarding these policies. This paper builds upon these theoretical insights, but unlike the existing literature, which focuses mainly on domestic policies and relies on experimental settings, we analyze foreign policy issues from a comparative perspective. More specifically, we examine the respective attitudes of the American and Mexican public toward political and economic ramifications of NAFTA ten years after the agreement was signed using data from national samples from both countries. This comparative framework allows us to examine two different elite frames of similar issues in both countries, thus significantly improving the external validity of the study. Using the data from 2004 Chicago Council of Foreign Relations, CIDE, and COMEXI public opinion surveys conducted in Mexico and the U.S we analyze the impact of affective attitudes toward both domestic and international groups benefiting from the economic changes caused by NAFTA interacted with elite political framing.