Legislators may consider both business interests and the preferences of voters when forming an attitude towards trade policy. But when business interests and voter preferences diverge, which side do they listen to? We argue that this depends on legislators’ ideology and the economic structure of the districts that legislators represent. With respect to ideology, we expect left-leaning and populist legislators to react more strongly to demands by the population, whereas right-wing legislators mostly follow business preferences. In terms of economic structure, our expectation is for business influence to be stronger on parliamentarians from non-competitive or poorer regions. We employ a series of survey experiments with nearly 1,000 legislators from 44 countries to test our expectations. Based on this unique dataset, we find support for our theoretical expectations. The influence of lobbying and public pressure is indeed contingent on legislators’ ideology and the economic structure of legislators’ districts. By offering a broad and comparative evaluation of both existing theories and novel arguments on determinants of elite attitudes towards trade policy, the paper speaks to large literatures on trade-policy making, interest group influence, and representation.