Publications and Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-24-2016
Abstract
Why are industries highly active in some battles over international trade policies, but in other instances, individual firms are highly active and industry groups are subdued? I argue that rising intra-industry trade in the postwar period has undermined traditional trade coalitions and created new opportunities for individual firms to become politically active. Drawing on new trade theories from economics, as well as work on firm heterogeneity and lobbying, I argue that industry associations become less active as intra-industry trade increases due to competing trade preferences among member firms. At the same time, individual firms become more politically active. My results suggest that firms lobby not only for protection, but liberalization. Using data on lobbying expenditures in the US, my work takes recent analyses of intra-industry trade and lobbying a step further. I show how intra-industry trade redraws domestic political alignments and changes the composition of societal coalitions organized to influence trade policy.
Comments
This work originally appeared in Review of International Political Economy.