This article examines the effects of party politics and presidential election cycles on U.S. recourse to force abroad. I analyze a game-theoretic model to generate predictions about these effects. In the unique time-consistent equilibrium outcome of the one-shot game, policy varies across political parties. In a subgame–perfect equilibrium outcome of the repeated game, the use of force is invariant to the partisan composition of government. In neither case does policy respond to the electoral cycle.An empirical analysis supports the predictions of the repeated game. Between 1870 and 1992, U.S. recourse to force abroad responds neither to partisan politics nor to the domestic political calendar. It responds only to changes in U.S. power status and to the advent of general wars.
R recent literature attributes the relative scarcity of open international markets to the prisoner's dilemma structure of state preferences with respect to trade. We argue that the prisoner's dilemma representation does not reflect the most critical aspect of free trade agreements in an anarchic international system, namely, their security externalities. We consider these external effects explicitly. Doing so leads us to two conclusions: (1) free trade is more likely within, rather than across, political-military alliances; and (2) alliances are more likely to evolve into free-trade coalitions if they are embedded in bipolar systems than in multipolar systems. Using data drawn from an 80-year period beginning in 1905, we test these hypotheses. The results of the analysis make it clear that alliances do have a direct, statistically significant, and large impact on bilateral trade flows and that this relationship is stronger in bipolar, rather than in multipolar, systems.
The "new" trade theory and standard trade theory make different predictions about the composition and distribution of trade flows+ Empirical evidence suggests that an increasing share of international trade consists of differentiated products, a consequence of increasing returns to scale+ Nonetheless, the existing political science literature typically assumes that the conditions of standard theory hold+ As such, the literature ignores the dynamic-inconsistency problem that imperfect markets can create+ In doing so, it also ignores the fact that imperfect markets can shift the political prerequisites of open international markets+ In this article we examine these shifts+ We argue that alliances can support an optimal level of trade when scale economies rather than differences in relative factor endowments motivate it+ Our empirical results support this argument, indicating that alliances exert a stronger influence on trade in goods produced under conditions of increasing rather than constant returns to scale+ To explain recent trends in both the composition and distribution of trade, economists have increasingly turned to what has come to be called the "new" trade theory+ As it assumes that production exhibits scale economies, this theory also assumes that imperfect markets exist+ In contrast, standard trade theory assumes that constant returns to scale characterize production and that markets are perfectly competitive+ Despite the increasing salience of the new trade theory, almost all studies of the political foundations of international trade remain premised on
Using data on bilateral trade flows from both before and after World War II, this article examines the impact of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on trade between its members and on the system of interwar trade blocs. It shows that the distribution of the benefits produced by the GATT was much more highly skewed than conventional wisdom assumes. The article also shows that the gold, Commonwealth, Reichsmark, and exchange-control blocs exerted positive and significant effects on trade after 1945. The authors attribute these effects to the bargaining protocol that governed successive rounds of GATT negotiations, the signature element of the postwar trade regime.
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