UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item American Populism, Political Information, and Trade Opinion(2022) Campana, Robert David Louis; Gimpel, James G.; Government and Politics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Trade policy is a complex issue that involves economics and international politics. Traditionally, Americans have not often expressed opinions on trade policy due to its high issue complexity and because Democrats and Republican politicians since the later part of the 20th century have been inconsistent in their support for neoliberalism or protectionism. Despite this, populist candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have repeatedly used their support for protectionist policies to differentiate themselves from more mainstream candidates. Using multiple public opinion surveys and survey experiments, this project explores how populism, anti-expert sentiment, anti-capitalism, diversity anxiety, and ethnonationalism influence American’s views on free trade policy and shows that all these factors are associated with greater support for protectionist policies. Additionally, this project examines and adjusts for the unusually high level of non-response regarding questions about trade policy.This project also analyzes what causes Americans to think trade policy (specifically, the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership) is more important. This project finds that Americans who believe themselves to be strangers in their own country are more likely to believe the withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific partnership is important. Meanwhile, Americans who believe the United States is less respected than in the past are less likely to believe the Trans-Pacific Partnership is important. Two survey experiments are conducted to see how the presence of “don’t know” responses in trade opinion questions and patriotic framing shift attitudes on trade policy. In both cases, issue framing does not significantly shift opinion on trade policy. This project carries out a longitudinal study to see how the same group of Americans shift their attitudes on trade policy over a multi-year time frame. Generally, these shifts are very small; however, Americans with differing views on regulation displayed the greatest attitudinal shift. Initially, Americans who wanted more government regulation were the most protectionist while Americans who wanted less government regulation were the least protectionist. Over the multi-year period, this association became significantly less visible. Finally, this project analyzes how economic attitudes, immigration attitudes, economic identity, immigrant identity, local immigrant populations, and local economic data influence views on trade policy. The study finds that immigration attitudes are closely aligned with views of trade policy.Item Imaging the Gap: Dissensus and Belonging in Thandile Zwelibanzi's Still Existence(2013) Williams, Jessica Rachelle; Hill, Shannen; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In his 2010 series, Still Existence, South African photographer Thandile Zwelibanzi images illegal African immigrants as they informally sell sweets and cigarettes on the streets of Johannesburg. In his documentation of the political arguments of these foreigners for their inclusion in the consensus of the nation, Zwelibanzi lends a medium to these individuals through which they can obtain aesthetic (and therefore political) agency. If, in Still Existence, the public sphere of Johannesburg's streets serve as the "dissensual stage" upon which foreign traders exert their claims of belonging and contest their right to work, then it is the process of their subjectivization and their argument for their belonging that are ultimately imaged in these portraits.Item Endogenous Property Rights Regimes, Common Property Resources and Trade Policies(2006-09-13) Galinato, Gregmar Ignacio; Chambers, Robert G; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)International clamor regarding the potential degradation of the environment in developing countries due to opening to trade has been an important issue that has moved from the streets into academic studies. This dissertation links the effect of opening to trade on resource stocks in developing countries by endogenizing the property rights regime choice. The model explains how communities that have communal ownership of a resource stock select the property rights regime governing the use of their resource stock via a voting mechanism. Then, the impact of opening to trade is linked to the choice of the property rights regime and, ultimately, to stock changes over time. We found that under some plausible assumptions, community members would vote to allow non-community members into the resource sector. Opening to trade, when the country has comparative advantage in the production of resource intensive goods, does result in a decrease in the long-run equilibrium stock. However, as long as property rights regimes are endogenous and the country follows the optimal trajectory path, we find that degrading the resource stock can be an optimal solution. A dynamic common property resource game with two sectors in the economy was designed and implemented to test some of the theoretical results. Experimental results indicated that subjects followed a dynamic path, but not the optimal one. The initial choices of the subjects greatly influenced the path which they take in the future. Without instruments or tools to correct for mistakes made during the initial time periods, communities will most likely follow a non-optimal dynamic path.Item Renewable Resources as a Factor of Production in International Trade(2005-11-04) Anriquez Nilson, Gustavo Adolfo; Lopez, Ramon E; Agricultural and Resource Economics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This work provides an extensive review of the literature on trade and environmental issues that has been growing since the early 1990s. The gaps in this literature are identified and generalizations are provided from results that are scattered. Next, we contribute to this literature by studying a Ricardian model of trade, in which one of the sectors uses a renewable resource as a factor of production. The contribution lies in the study of trade and welfare through the full horizon of the welfare maximization problem, not relying in equilibrium analysis. This study is divided into small country case and a 2 country - 2 factor model. In the first case, we show how trade prevents extinction, and if the assumption of full open access environmental externality is relaxed the welfare expected results change substantially. In the 2 x 2 model we show that equilibrium is actually not possible invalidating many such analyses existing in the literature. This lack of equilibrium may lead the country that is free from environmental externalities to actually lose with trade vis-à-vis autarky.