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The attention international trade receives at the domestic level varies widely across countries as well as among political elites within the same country. When and why are political elites likely to dedicate attention to this issue, and what is the policy position on which they are likely to focus when doing so? We argue that political elites are more likely to focus domestic attention on international trade when their country's economy is more dependent upon trade. The balance of trade is likely to influence the degree to which trade liberalization or protectionism is the main focus of elites at the domestic level, and the complexity of their country's trade policies is likely to mediate this relationship between the trade balance and the trade-policy positions that dominate the domestic agenda. We test this argument by analyzing how political elites chose to focus on international trade in their party platforms in the lead-up to national elections across fifty-three countries from 1960 through 2014. The results show that these characteristics of countries' trade policies are related in important ways to political elites' strategic choice regarding when and how to focus domestic attention on international trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free trade has gradually shifted the burden of military service onto the American South. While trade shocks generally lead to local increases in US Army enlistment, there are two different regional dynamics that concentrate this effect in the South. First, trade-related job losses are disproportionately concentrated in this region, where manufacturing jobs gradually migrated during the second half of the twentieth century. Second, the South's "military tradition," a relatively youthful population, and weak labor unions, combine to translate trade shocks into larger spikes in Army enlistment than the rest of the country. This paper uses county-level data from 1996–2010 to demonstrate the importance of meso-level, regional factors for understanding the location of trade shocks, as well as how communities adjust to such economic dislocations. We find that trade-related job losses account for roughly 7% of the South's over-representation in the Army during our period of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the great questions for scholars of international relations and economics concerns the relationship between the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the natural environment. Does membership in the multilateral trade regime constrain environmental regulation and increase the environmental burden of national economies? Do countries pay a heavy environmental price for trade liberalization? Although this question has been debated extensively, there is little statistical evidence to contribute the debate. We provide a comprehensive statistical analysis of the environmental effects of joining the multilateral trade regime. We collected data on a variety of environmental policies, institutions, and outcomes that should be influenced by the General Agreementon Tariffs and Trade (GATT)/WTO membership if the predictions of environmental pessimists or optimists are valid. A wide range of statistical models designed to identify the causal effect of the GATT/WTO on the environmental indicators shows that joining the GATT/WTO does not have negative effects on environmental quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Empirical research on the determinants of individual-level support for trade liberalization has focused almost entirely on the economic effects of trade. Yet, international relations scholarship has long recognized that commerce also has a variety of security implications. This paper explores if and when security considerations influence individual attitudes toward trade. In this study, we ask two questions: First, to what extent do expectations about the security implications of trade affect individual-level attitudes toward trade agreements? Second, does the introduction of security concerns into the discussion of trade agreements influence how heavily individuals weigh their economic costs and benefits? We employ an original experiment embedded in a conjoint survey to investigate the relative impact of a variety of economic and security considerations on respondents' support for trade. Our findings suggest that security information matters and undermines the appeal of some, though not all, economic arguments for trade liberalization among our respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resistance to trade and demands for protectionist policy can derive from social as well as economic factors. A sense of cultural threat surrounding immigrants, especially immigrants visibly from groups that are widely stigmatized among the local population, may potentially stimulate such recoiling from exposure to the world. Voting patterns in the 1889 election in New South Wales, Australia, confirm this hypothesis: in a contest between the Protectionist and Free Trade Parties amidst reaction against the Chinese-Australian population, larger shares of voters preferred the protectionist, trade-restricting side in areas with proportionately larger ethnically Chinese populations than in otherwise similar areas elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many studies have shown that greater trade openness affects the overall size of social spending, this study emphasizes that it also affects types of social policies that a government prioritizes. When faced with deepening trade competition, governments tend to use different policy measures to address the opportunities and challenges stemming from their economic competitiveness in the international market. Policy makers in countries with high relative labor costs are likely to privilege social insurances and income transfer. This is because as high labor costs make their workers more vulnerable in the trade competition, governments seek to protect skilled labor in order to maintain their economic advantage in advanced industries. In contrast, when relative labor costs are low, human capital investment programs are likely to be emphasized to enhance productivity and the quality of labor to capitalize the cost competitiveness of a country’s workers. The findings from empirical analyzes of 26 OECD economies from 1991 to 2012 support these arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies show that democracy promotes freer trade. However, because they typically focus on “at-the-border” barriers such as tariffs, we know little about democracy’s effects on “behind-the-border” barriers such as discrimination in government procurement. We address this question by asking how democracy affects governments’ incentives to discriminate against foreigners when buying goods and services. We argue that “buy national” policies have unclear costs and are harder to attack than policies that visibly interfere with consumers’ ability to buy foreign goods. This makes such provisions more attractive than tariffs to democratic leaders seeking reelection. We thus hypothesize that democracy leads to lower tariffs but to greater discrimination in public procurement. We support this hypothesis with an analysis of procurement and imports in 138 countries from 1990 to 2008. Our results imply that a full understanding of the democracy–trade policy relationship requires attention to increasingly prominent behind-the-border barriers to trade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study uses theory from embedded liberalism to reorient the debate over efficiency versus compensation in the trade and welfare literature. We detail the causal mechanisms and provide empirical results that show how welfare spending can be a necessary condition to further trade liberalization. We argue that increases in welfare compensation lead to stronger public support for trade, which allows states to further advance along the path toward trade liberalization. Based on the 1995 and 2003 ISSP (International Social Survey Program) for 10 OECD countries, our multilevel statistical analyses (individual and country level) show that (1) workers in import-exposed sectors tend to strongly oppose trade, but this effect is substantially diminished when they receive unemployment compensation, and (2) public support for free trade is significantly associated with higher levels of trade openness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]