Sean D. Ehrlich

Access to Protection: Domestic Institutions and Trade Policy in Democracies

Previous institutional explanations of trade policy have focused on the role of proportional representation on the promotion of free trade. This explanation generates numerous unsolved anomalies and provides limited guidance in explaining the difference between proportional representation countries and between majoritarian countries as well as within-country variation in trade policy. This article introduces a more general institutional theory that argues that the number of access points provided by institutions is the crucial institutional feature, as increasing the number of access points makes lobbying less costly, which benefits protectionists. From this, I hypothesize that the number of parties in government, the number of electoral districts, the nature of the vote, and other such institutions affect the level of protection and that, once these factors are controlled for, proportional representation has no impact on trade policy. I test this theory on tariff data in the post–World War II developed democracies and find broad support for these hypotheses.This article was previously presented at the 2004 Annual Meetings of the Midwest Political Science Association. I would like to thank Alan Deardorff, Rob Franzese, Matt Golder, Mike Hanmer, Jude Hays, Cherie Maestas, Corrine McConnaughy, Will Moore, James D. Morrow, Won-Ho Park, and Jeff Staton for advice and comments and Yoshi Ono for excellent research assistance. All errors, of course, remain my own.

Who Supports Compensation? Individual Preferences for Trade-Related Unemployment Insurance

The political economy of trade literature argues that the policy of compensating those who lose from trade is an important component of maintaining public support for free-trade, a linkage known as the compensation hypothesis or embedded liberalism thesis. This article tests the causal mechanisms underlying the compensation hypothesis by examining support for trade-related compensation using survey data from the United States. Expectations about the effects of trade strongly predict support for trade-related unemployment insurance, with those who expect to lose more likely to support and those who expect to gain more like to oppose, but has no influence on support for general unemployment insurance despite previous research suggesting it should.

How Common is the Common External Tariff

This article examines the role of national-level politics and economics on the setting of supranational trade policy within the European Union (EU). It argues that, though EU member states must have a uniform tariff schedule, significant variation remains in the average, trade-weighted tariff because each country has a different bundle of imports into each country. Thus, some countries import more high-tariff goods than others. This article argues that a significant part of this variation is intentional, because countries know which goods they import. Therefore, countries that prefer protection push for tariffs on products they import whereas countries that prefer free trade push for liberalization on products they import, with these preferences being driven by the amount of institutional access provided to interest groups and the economic conditions in the member states. This argument is tested with regression analyses of a panel of average tariff rates in the EU member states and the tariff schedule agreed to by the EU at the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

Which Countries Go Green? An Access Point Theory of Democratic Institutions and Environmental Regulations

The amount of environmental regulation varies across countries but, despite the increasing importance of the environment, previous research has provided few answers why. Building upon recent scholarship on democratic institutions, this article explores this variation within democracies by applying Access Point Theory to environmental policy. The basic hypothesis of the article is that the more access points - policymakers who can be lobbied - that a country has, the less environmental regulation there should be. This is because increasing the number of access points decreases the costs of lobbying due to competitive pressure between the access points. Industries opposed to environmental regulation will be better able to take advantage of cheaper lobbying because of their greater ability to overcome the collective action problem resulting from the concentrated costs of regulation. This hypothesis is tested on panel data for post-World War II developed democracies using environmental treaties as a proxy for domestic regulation.