Trade talks and populist thoughts

__by Samuel Desmarais__ Much of the recent work on trade connects rising economic pain from Chinese imports to increase in partisanship. Populism on both sides of the aisle, particularly Republicans, serves as the link between economic pain and partisanship. This paper seeks to test whether that populism is measurable, so as to see if it could be playing this theorized middle step in the causal process between economics and partisanship. There seems to be at least some increase on aggregate in the amount of populism, which supports claims that populism may be a part of the process. However, no evidence was found of an increase in rightist, out-group targeting populism. This casts some doubt on whether this form of populism is in fact mediating economic pain that has heavily fallen upon predominantly white, working-class communities. __Text analysis methods used__: _dictionary-based concept measurement, topic modeling_.

May 5, 2020

12:00 AM

William & Mary

Honors Thesis in International Relations