Megumi Naoi

Free Trade Agreements and Domestic Politics: The Case of the Trans‐Pacific Partnership Agreement

What is the role of domestic politics in facilitating or constraining a governments decision to participate in free trade agreements (FTAs)? This paper seeks to answer this question by focusing on the domestic politics in Japan over the Trans‐Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). In particular, we ask why the opposition to the TPP encompasses a much broader segment of society than is predicted by trade theorems. We show that a broader protectionist coalition can emerge through persuasion and policy campaigns by the elites, in particular, powerful protectionist interests expending resources to persuade the uncertain public.

Multilateralism and Democracy: A Dissent Regarding Keohane, Macedo, and Moravcsik

In an article printed last year in International Organization , Keohane, Macedo, and Moravcsik argued that multilateral organizations (MLO) could actually be good for democracy. We argue that KMM discount the prospect that MLO influence can be detrimental to democracies not because MLOs are “distant, elitist, and technocratic” but precisely because MLOs are highly political. International organizations have much to offer in improving the welfare of citizens and facilitating coordinations among states. They are not likely to improve procedural functions of democracies without a cost that itself is problematic for democracy.

Workers or Consumers? A Survey Experiment on the Duality of Citizens’ Interests in the Politics of Trade:

What determines the attitude of citizens toward international trade in advanced industrialized nations? The question raises an intriguing paradox for low-income citizens in developed economies. Increasing imports pose the most severe threat to job security for low-income citizens, who, on the other hand, reap the greatest benefits from cheaper imports as consumers. This article considers the role of dual identities that citizens have as both income-earners and consumers, and investigates how attitudes toward trade differ depending on which aspect of respondents’ lives—that is, work versus consumption—is activated. The results of an originally designed survey experiment conducted in Japan during the recession suggest that the activation of a consumer perspective is associated with much higher support for free trade. In particular, those respondents who have lower levels of job security are the ones who, with consumer-priming, increase their support for foreign imports.

The Domestic Politics of Japan’s Regional Foreign Economic Policies

Japan has been a prime mover of East Asian economic regionalism ever since the late 1980s, albeit not without often fierce domestic resistance at various key junctures. Indeed, Japan’s often resistant role in Pacific and Asian regionalism has been bound up with its domestic politics, both intrabureaucratic and intercoalitional politics. In order to fully understand Japan’s changing policies toward regionalism, we need to identify domestic obstacles for further liberalization and how they interact with regional and international environments.

Framing Business Interests: How Campaigns Affect Firms’ Positions on Preferential Trade Agreements

What determines firm executives’ policy positions on public policies and to what extent can a government campaign affect such positions? We demonstrate that a government’s campaign can frame business elites, just as it can with the public, and that firms’ economic interests only weakly account for their policy positions. We leverage an original survey of Japanese firm executives on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP) embedded in the sub-national variations of policy campaigns, where half of our respondents were exposed to location- and sector-specific anti-TPP campaigns and the rest were not. We find that company executives that operated in “negative campaign” prefectures are five percentage points more likely to predict that the TPP would harm their businesses after addressing a host of endogeneity issues. We further identify “a cascade of losers/winners” mechanism where firm executives rely on cues from the largest losers or winners of a policy change. The results revise the conventional wisdom that business elites are sophisticates who are immune to elite framing.

'Yes-Man' Firms: Government Campaigns and Policy Positioning of Businesses in China

We advance a theory of strategic preference expression in authoritarian systems, where business elites express dissent or conformity to the government based on material incentives. Their position-taking strategies vary depending on whether firms have the bargaining power to extract benefits or avoid punishment from the government. Using survey experiments with firm executives in China, we show that a government campaign treatment — a preface that signals the government’s commitment to opening further to inward foreign direct investment (FDI) — increases the percentage of firms reporting “benefit” from inward FDI between 14 and 36 percentage points. The executives of politically vulnerable firms (private owned) conform to the government’s position the most. Private firms with higher financial dependence on government conform more than their non-private counterparts. The executives of powerful firms (state-owned and foreign-owned) change their responses the least to induce policy concessions. We demonstrate a material origin of political desirability bias in autocracies.