Abstract
Written with AI: Standard models of trade policy emphasize aggregate welfare and consumer surplus. This paper proposes an alternative political-economy mechanism. Building on Alliance Theory (Pinsof, Sears, and Haselton 2023) and sociological accounts of expertise as jurisdiction (Turner 2003), I argue that commitments to trade liberalization can operate as coalition-maintaining signals among transnational elites. On this view, prominent deviations such as tariff shocks are interpreted less as technical disagreements than as public defections that threaten institutional trust and status hierarchies. The framework generates testable implications for political rhetoric and expert intervention: responses should emphasize delegitimization and consensus enforcement more than policy-specific rebuttal, especially when elite coordination is at stake.
I. Beyond GDP: Trade Policy as a Coordination Mechanism
Benchmark neoclassical models of trade liberalization prioritize the optimization of the production possibilities frontier and the maximization of aggregate welfare. However, elite responses to recent protectionist pivots suggest that trade policy also operates according to a distinct political logic. In this paper, I argue that trade liberalization functions as a high-status coordination technology for a transnational elite alliance characterized by deep integration among multinational firms, financial intermediaries, international institutions, and credentialed bureaucracies.
Building on Alliance Theory, political belief systems are treated here not as expressions of abstract moral commitments but as instruments for mobilizing support among allies and sanctioning rivals. Within this framework, free trade operates as a form of social property. It facilitates shared career paths, standardized professional languages, and mutually legible norms that allow elite actors to coordinate across jurisdictions. Commitment to trade liberalization thus serves as a signal of institutional reliability within this alliance.
When a sovereign actor deploys tariffs to override prevailing trade norms, the response often exceeds what would be predicted by the magnitude of estimated welfare effects. I hypothesize that such actions are interpreted not primarily as technical disagreements but as coalitional defections. Because the authority of the domestic governing stratum, understood here as the administrative and expert apparatus through which policy is implemented, relies heavily on administrative compliance and expert certification rather than direct democratic persuasion, assertions of national sovereignty over trade rules threaten the credibility of the coordination equilibrium. As a result, discourse shifts away from empirical contestation toward boundary maintenance, using moralized attribution frames that recast the challenger as an illegitimate or out-group actor.
This framework yields testable implications. If trade policy functions as a coordination mechanism, then deviations should trigger disproportionate delegitimizing rhetoric relative to their estimated economic impact. We should also observe increased emphasis on expert consensus and settled literature following defection events, alongside a tendency to reframe producer-oriented objections as parochial or normatively suspect rather than substantively engaging their distributional claims.
II. The Jurisdictional Monopoly of Expertise
A central pillar of this coordination equilibrium is the role of economic expertise. Following Turner (2003), I treat expertise as a jurisdictional claim over a defined domain of social decision-making. This jurisdiction must be defended against lay intrusion to retain its value as social property. In the context of trade policy, mathematized economic models function as an effective barrier to entry, delimiting who has standing to speak authoritatively.
Modern states rely on technocratic languages that appear neutral and objective to coordinate policy across diverse actors without engaging in explicit value-based bargaining. Mathematical formalism provides a thin description of reality, translating distributive conflicts into welfare curves and efficiency metrics. I refer to the authority generated by this process as Preclusive Legitimacy: by framing trade policy as a domain of scientific certainty, the alliance restricts participation to credentialed experts and precludes non-credentialed citizens from meaningful standing.
Contempt toward heterodox challengers can be understood as a rational response within this system. If a lay actor challenges trade models using tacit knowledge drawn from production, management, or local industrial experience, the jurisdictional authority of the expert is threatened. Because production-side competence is disproportionately tacit, place-bound, and resistant to standardization, it is difficult to credential, audit, or incorporate into centralized models. I hypothesize that this structural incompatibility incentivizes expert institutions to suppress or discount production-side variables in favor of abstractions that preserve their jurisdictional monopoly.
III. The Paradox of Stealth Industrial Policy: A Coalitional Truce
The relative absence of a formal, mission-driven industrial policy in the United States is often attributed to ideological commitments to market neutrality. I advance an alternative explanation. The avoidance of explicit industrial policy reflects a coalitional truce within the elite alliance. A formal mission requires the state to publicly select priorities, exposing internal distributional conflicts and creating durable obligations to specific firms, regions, and workforces. Such commitments are destabilizing for an alliance built on abstraction, mobility, and deniability.
Instead, the alliance relies on what can be termed Stealth Industrial Policy. State support is channeled through indirect instruments such as tax credits, R&D subsidies, intellectual property regimes, and defense procurement. These mechanisms preserve the appearance of market neutrality while disproportionately benefiting capital-intensive, high-technology firms already embedded within the elite hierarchy.
The CHIPS and Science Act, enacted in 2022, illustrates this logic. Its passage required relocating the policy debate from the economic jurisdiction to the national security jurisdiction. Survival framing is sufficiently powerful to override coalition-maintenance constraints. I hypothesize that once the salience of the security justification diminishes, reversion pressures toward efficiency-based discourse will reassert themselves, as the alliance seeks to restore internal equilibrium and prevent the emergence of a durable, producer-led rival coalition.
IV. The Status Revolution: Dignity as a Disruptive Metric
An emerging challenge to the efficiency-centered regime is the increasing salience of dignity as a metric of economic performance. In coalitional terms, dignity is a disruptive value. It is person-bound and place-bound, and it resists the aggregation required for global elite coordination. When political actors invoke dignity, they initiate a status reordering that seeks to shift prestige away from credentialed mediators and toward producers engaged in socially embedded work.
This shift requires alternative evaluative tools. I propose two complementary metrics: the Self-Sufficiency Index (SSI) and the Credentialism Gap. The SSI redefines economic success from flow to capacity by measuring a nation’s ability to meet critical production needs within its own regulatory and security perimeter. By emphasizing fixed capital and domestic competence, the SSI forces an interest convergence between capital owners and place-bound citizens.
The Credentialism Gap measures the divergence in economic and social standing between degree-holding managers and skilled trade producers within the same sectors and regions. A widening gap signals that the economy is operating as a status hierarchy of mediation rather than a meritocracy of production. Narrowing this gap functions as a de-consecration of expert authority by reasserting the social value of tacit, productive knowledge.
Together, these metrics transform the trade debate from a problem of technical optimization into a contest over status and membership. If dignity becomes a governing criterion, efficiency can no longer function as a neutral alibi. The resulting conflict is not merely about prices or growth rates, but about who has standing to define economic reality and for whom the economy ultimately exists.
V. Implications for Empirical Research
The framework developed here is intended to be falsifiable rather than merely interpretive. If trade liberalization functions as a coordination mechanism within an elite alliance, and if expertise operates as a jurisdictional monopoly that enforces this equilibrium, several empirical implications follow.
First, defection events should produce rhetorical responses that are disproportionate to their estimated economic impact. Following tariff announcements or trade-rule deviations, elite discourse should shift toward delegitimization rather than cost-benefit rebuttal. This can be tested using text-based measures of moralized attribution frames in editorials, policy statements, and expert commentary, relative to benchmark welfare estimates associated with the policy change.
Second, expert actors should intensify boundary-policing behavior after defection events. Observable indicators include increased use of phrases such as “the literature is settled,” “expert consensus,” or “responsible economics,” alongside appeals to credentialed authority. These signals should spike temporally following challenges to trade orthodoxy and decline once alliance equilibrium is restored.
Third, producer-oriented objections should be reframed rather than directly engaged. Instead of contesting distributional claims on their merits, elite discourse should characterize such objections as parochial, emotional, or normatively suspect. This prediction can be evaluated by comparing the framing of producer concerns to that of consumer-price concerns within the same policy episode.
Fourth, jurisdictional shifts should relax coalition constraints. Policies framed under national security or survival justifications should encounter less delegitimizing rhetoric from elite actors than economically similar policies framed in distributive or industrial terms. This implies that the same intervention, when placed in a different jurisdictional category, generates systematically different expert responses.
Finally, the adoption of dignity-oriented metrics should provoke resistance that targets legitimacy rather than feasibility. Proposals emphasizing self-sufficiency, place-based capacity, or producer status should elicit critiques centered on irresponsibility, irrationality, or danger, rather than narrow technical objections. Tracking the content and tone of these responses provides a direct test of whether dignity functions as a disruptive status signal.
Together, these implications outline a research agenda that bridges political economy, the sociology of expertise, and institutional analysis. By treating trade policy not only as an efficiency problem but as a coordination problem embedded in status hierarchies, this framework offers a parsimonious explanation for patterns of elite behavior that standard models leave unexplained.
