Issue-Areas, Sovereignty Costs, and North Americans’ Attitudes Toward Regional Cooperation

Authors

Malcolm Fairbrother, Umeå Universitet
Tom Long, University of Warwick
Clarisa Pérez-Armendáriz, Bates CollegeFollow

Publication Title

Global Studies Quarterly

Document Type

Article

Department or Program

Latin American and Latinx Studies

Publication Date

3-10-2022

Abstract

Studies of public opinion toward regionalism tend to rely on questions regarding trade integration and specific regional organizations. This narrow focus overlooks dimensions of regionalism that sit at the heart of international relations research on regions today. Instead, we argue that research should explore public preferences with respect to regional cooperation in different issue-areas. We find that people’s views of regional cooperation in North America diverge from their attitudes toward trade integration alone. Using data from Rethinking North America, an untapped public opinion survey conducted in Mexico, Canada, and the United States in 2013, we show that although country-level attitudes toward trade integration in North America were similar, preferences for regional cooperation varied by country depending on the issue at hand. We propose that attitudes are shaped by citizens’ perceptions of the asymmetric patterns of national-level benefits and vulnerabilities created by regional cooperation. Generally, respondents favor cooperation where their state stands to gain greater capacity benefits and oppose it where cooperation imposes greater costs on national autonomy. For policymakers, this multifaceted approach to regionalism sheds light on areas where public preferences for regional cooperation might converge. Future research that disaggregates various aspects of support for regional cooperation should help integrate the study of public opinion with “new” and comparative regional approaches that emphasize the aspects of regionalism beyond trade and formal institutions.

Comments

Original version is available from the publisher at: https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksac011

Recommended Citation

Fairbrother, M., Long, T., & Pérez-Armendáriz, C. (2022). Issue-Areas, Sovereignty Costs, and North Americans’ Attitudes Toward Regional Cooperation. Global Studies Quarterly, 2(1).

Copyright Note

© The Author(s) (2022). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.