From Information to Meaning: Framing Trade Agreements

Public international law information is complex, and gathering and processing information are costly. In this context, many scholars argue that issue framing by elites operates as heuristics in the processing of events by the public, thus impacting its preferences. Chapter 6 is a first attempt at measuring how international law information is framed in elite discourse, using international trade law as a case study. Drawing on two novel corpora of parliamentary debates and opinion articles from six countries, this chapter studies elite framing using a text-as-data approach, namely by measuring the tone, volume, and issue-frame usage across time and space. These data are then used to study to what extent these frames can be mapped to rational choice and behavioral economics theories of trade preference formation. The analysis suggests that while frames traditionally linked with rational choice models of trade preferences are still prevalent, other frames less discussed by the literature and closer to behavioral approaches are also very prevalent in elite discourse.