Survey finds WTO too secretive for most

The World Trade Organization will never gain broad public acceptance until it becomes much more open and democratic, a new University of Washington opinion survey indicates.

Nearly eight in 10 Puget Sound residents surveyed after the calamitous trade conference said the WTO is secretive and shuts the public out.

“Most people seem to recognize that world trade policy is needed and important,” said Keith Stamm, a professor of communications who directed the survey. “They just don’t want to leave it in the hands of an elite group.”

The survey, conducted two weeks before the talks and two weeks after, also shows how the chaos in downtown Seattle sparked a stunning nosedive in popular support for WTO.

Local politicians weren’t the only ones who approached the WTO talks with rosy expectations: 70 percent of Puget Sound residents surveyed before the conference expected it to improve Seattle’s image; afterward, only 6 percent said it had.

“In my 30 years of doing this sort of research, I’ve never seen that huge a change in so short a time,” Stamm said. “The public was just as surprised as the city fathers.”

To gauge public opinion before and after the talks, Stamm and six UW graduate students interviewed 405 passengers aboard Puget Sound ferries using a peer-reviewed method known as multistage probability sampling. The survey has a 5 percent margin of error, Stamm said, and previous studies have confirmed that ferry riders are demographically similar to the Puget Sound population as a whole.

Among the findings: