In this paper, we explore the relationship between international trade openness and two major political distortions, political uncertainty, and political polarization. We consider two measures of trade openness, the trade expenditures and the number of trade partners, as well as their volatility. As political distortions and trade characteristics of the country are endogenously related, we instrument the political uncertainty by the standard deviation of the effective political leaders’ ages of a country and the minimum age of the political leaders of a country's neighbors. We find that political uncertainty reduces the level of trade openness and increases the volatility of trade openness while political polarization negatively affects both the level and the volatility of trade openness. We propose a simple theoretical model that provides the intuition on the relationship between political distortions and trade openness.

中文翻译：

---

贸易开放和政治扭曲

在本文中，我们探讨了国际贸易开放与两大政治扭曲、政治不确定性和政治两极分化之间的关系。我们考虑贸易开放度的两个衡量标准，即贸易支出和贸易伙伴的数量，以及它们的波动性。由于该国的政治扭曲和贸易特征是内生相关的，我们通过一国有效政治领导人年龄和邻国政治领导人最低年龄的标准差来衡量政治不确定性。我们发现，政治不确定性降低了贸易开放水平，增加了贸易开放的波动性，而政治两极分化对贸易开放的水平和波动性都产生了负面影响。