What is the relationship between trade agreements and democracy? This project, originally financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation, aims to explore in greater depth and novel ways how trade agreements (preferential trade agreements and the WTO) impact on democratic institutions and processes. Trade agreements have been part of a liberal trade order that has been created and sustained by Western democracies since the 1950’s. But, today the liberal trade order is facing many challenges. Most importantly, the current US Administration is turning its back to economic multilateralism. However, the US is not alone in re-calibrating its approach to global trade regulation as we witness growing discontent in many democratic societies for a number of years. In contrast to the past, trade agreements have become increasingly contested among various segments of societies. We observe growing criticism related to various issues regarding the democratic organization and underlying institutions and values (the societal fabric) at home. In this project, we aim to push the research frontier on the question how trade agreements and democracy interact. There is surprisingly little systematic work on this important question. We study the conditions under which trade treaties support and foster democratic principles and processes, and under which conditions they backfire by weakening them. We strive to problematize and uncover the subtleties and complexities of causal relations between trade agreements and democracy. We work therefore towards a new theory of the trade-democracy nexus. We not only question existing theoretical contributions and established explanations, but aim to provide new and underexplored theoretical building stones to launch a new research avenue that is fruitful beyond research on international economic agreements.

A new dataset

The TRADEM dataset gathers information on six different types of democracy-related provisions in 792 preferential trade agreements. For more information, please visit our Data page.

Further ongoing data collection

• Implementation of democracy-related provisions in Chile, Peru, Vietnam and South Africa.
• Activities of the World Trade Organization (WTO):
  • Accession process: commitments, legislative action plans, question and replies, list of members of the working party, reports of working party members.
  • Trade policy review mechanism (TPRM): secretariat and members’ reports, questions and answers, minutes.

Funding & Support