Trade Agreements and Democracy: An Uneasy Relationship?

On Tuesday, 20 May, Prof. Manfred Elsig from our ENLIGHT partner, the University of Bern, will visit Groningen to present his research on the relationship between trade agreements and democracy. The event is jointly organized by the Global Economics and Management (GEM) research group at the Faculty of Economics and Business and the Center for International Relations Research (CIRR) at the Faculty of Arts.

The relationship between trade and democracy has been studied extensively. What has received less attention is how trade agreements integrate democracy promotion obligations and to what effect. This lecture provides insights from an ongoing research project that studies this nexus in greater detail. The lecture presents the genesis of a new dataset called TRADEM, which uses a mix of manual coding and supervised machine learning to map democracy provisions in 792 preferential trade agreements. In addition, it shares insights from a set of empirical studies to better understand the content and variation of democracy-related provisions in these agreements (and related trade treaties) and their overall effects through in-depth case studies.