POLS0043 Portfolio #1 Week 1 Prompt
1
Identifying Trade Demands in the Wild
Media coverage of negotiations over trade agreements and their expected effects on stakeholders often
indirectly reflects the models of trade politics that we introduced this week. However, these competing
political demands are often presented in an ad hoc manner, which can present difficulties for interpreting
them in their broader context.
Your task is to choose a country that has participated in negotiations for one of the trade agreements listed
below and identify patterns in expressions private-actor attitudes and demands around its participation.
Apply at least two of the models introduced in class to analyse the structure of demands from stakeholders
and/or groups of stakeholders.
Trade Agreements
African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA/CFTA)
Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP; note that this
agreement excludes the United States)
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)
Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership (TTIP; this one was never signed)
Suggestions and Considerations
 Look at the academic literature and high-quality media sources for direct evidence of the models.
Simply describing the patterns predicted by the different models will not be a sufficient response
to the prompt.
 Try to find evidence for as many of the models as you can in order to provide a comprehensive
and parsimonious analysis.
 Keep in mind that trade-agreement effects are not equivalent to stakeholder demands. Simply
assuming a group is harmed by (or benefits from) trade liberalisation based on a model’s
predictions is not the same as that group’s expressed stance on the agreement.
 Show don’t tell: your understanding of models should be apparent from how they are applied,
rather than taking the space to describe their theoretical expectations in detail. As an example: The
relative scarcity of arable land and low-skilled labour in Japan has contributed to uniform and robust industry-wide
demands for trade protection, in line with the sector model’s predictions (Naoi and Kuno, 2015).
 It may be helpful to look back at the seminar quiz and key when trying to link models to evidence.