New WTI Research Project: Trade and Democracy (TRADEM)

TRADEM examines how trade agreements and democracy interact. The project team aims to investigate the conditions under which trade agreements support democratic principles and processes and under which conditions these are restricted. It also wants to develop new explanations of causal mechanisms between contracts and indicators of democracy. The empirical study focuses on both the World Trade Organization (WTO) and Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). 

The project team will collect democracy-relevant obligations in trade contracts, create a new corpus of international contracts and test the effects of international trade law with a view to domestic implementation. The empirical support is based on quantitative and qualitative methods, as well as "text-as-data" and "crowd-sourcing" approaches.

The project is lead by WTI Deputy Managing Director and Director of Research, Prof. Manfred Elsig. His research team consists of Kirthana Ganeson form Singapore, Andrew Lugg from the United States of America and Marine Roux from France.