Comprehensive Trade Agreements (CTAs) — a new generation of free trade deals — challenge traditional models of trade preferences. This research identifies citizens' trust in government as a key predictor of Members of the European Parliament (MEP) support for CTAs and presents a unified framework that combines economic and noneconomic factors to explain trade preferences.

📊 How Voting and Trust Were Studied

• Original dataset of European Parliament trade votes covering three recent CTAs: the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with Canada (CETA), and the EU–Korea Free Trade Agreement.
• Multilevel statistical model used to estimate how variation in citizens’ trust in government relates to individual MEP roll-call votes on CTAs.
• Integrated a unified framework that accounts for both economic and noneconomic drivers of trade preferences.

🔑 Key Findings

• Higher levels of citizens’ trust in government are associated with a greater likelihood that MEPs vote in favor of CTAs.
• This relationship is observed in analyses of TTIP, CETA, and the EU–Korea FTA using the original trade-voting dataset and multilevel modeling.
• The results complement economic explanations by showing that public trust shapes elite position-taking on modern, comprehensive trade agreements.

🌍 Why It Matters

• Introduces a novel theoretical argument linking public trust to elite behavior on trade policy, expanding explanations of trade preferences beyond purely economic factors.
• Offers insights relevant to scholars of representation, trade politics, and executive-legislative interaction in the EU context, and suggests that public attitudes about governance influence how elected officials approach complex international agreements.