Bootleggers, Baptists, and Policymakers: Domestic Discourse Coalitions in EU–Mercosur Negotiations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the dynamics of coalition formation in the context of the EU–Mercosur negotiations, utilizing the “Bootleggers and Baptists” analogy to understand how diverse actors—such as import‐competing sectors, civil society organizations, and policymakers—engage in issue‐linkage in public debates surrounding preferential trade agreement negotiations. The framework explores three types of coalition formation: opportunistic framing, strategic alliance, and mediated convergence, each representing varying degrees of coordination between moral and economic actors. The findings suggest that active coordination between such groups is rare, yet de facto coalitions are quite important. The empirical analysis uses quantitative text analysis of online debates in France and Ireland to show that coalitions are formed through opportunistic framing, rather than strategic alliance or mediated convergence. The findings are corroborated through a congruence analysis of discourse networks demonstrating that Bootleggers and Baptists represent distinct communities, each primarily engaging with their own narratives and borrowing from the other only when it serves a strategic purpose. These findings suggest that policy outcomes are shaped more by the overlap of win‐sets and the de facto coalitions necessary for ratification, rather than deliberate issue‐linkage by policymakers or the formation of alliances across groups. The results have important implications for understanding how environmental, labour, and human rights concerns become intertwined with trade policy. We demonstrate that, even when there is a confluence of interests between actors, discourse coalitions tend to grow across actor types as a result of discursive opportunism rather than strategic alliances.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".