A Historical Institutionalist Approach to the Uruguay Round Agricultural Negotiations

Abstract

The reduction of agricultural trade barriers accomplished at the close of the Uruguay Round (UR) of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is a puzzle because previous research has suggested that producer groups would always succeed in blocking liberalization efforts. The author explains this apparent puzzle through the use of a comparative historical method developed by Collier and Collier for analyzing the UR as a critical juncture. The analysis suggests that transformations in productive technology enabled producer groups to reap extraordinary economic and political rents during most of the post-World War II era. However, the fiscal crises of the 1980s provided governments an incentive to exert relative autonomy from producer groups and initiate bargaining over trade barriers. As trade barriers and the political influence of producer groups were reduced, the UR emerged as the product of a critical juncture in the transition from the Fordist to the post-Fordist mode of agricultural accumulation.

The Political Economy of Agricultural Protection

“…In fact, recessions are negatively correlated with agricultural producer support, and significantly so in Model 1, which reflects the general ambiguity in the larger trade protectionist literature on the effect of economic downturns. In contradiction to Paarlberg (1997) and Thies (2001), fiscal crises in general are not significantly related to agricultural producer support, though it is possible that some fiscal crises in certain contexts may be more important than others, which would not be picked up by statistical modeling. 10…”

“…The fourth approach recognizes that certain types of shocks may ultimately drive changes in institutionalized producer support (Anderson and Hayami 1986). Thies (2001) has argued that changes in the post-World War II global structure of agricultural production were not immediately translated into reductions in agricultural protectionism in the developed countries. Instead, the budgetary crises experienced in the 1980s opened up a historical juncture when the UR agricultural negotiations to reduce protectionism became possible.…”

War, Rivalry, and State Building in Latin America

“…, Ertman 1997;Waldner 1999) and has frequently been employed in the Latin American context to analyze the path-dependent nature of state institutions (e.g., Collier and Collier 1991;Mahoney 2001). Historical institutionalists argue that institutional arrangements tend toward stability until they are disrupted by some political or economic shock (Thies 2001a). Stability is the result of institutional arrangements that privilege certain agents, such as political, societal, or military elites, who work to perpetuate their role, status, and benefits.…”

Designing Subnational Institutions

“…As a result, the historical approach advocates a less abstracted and more contextualized study of institutions, with a great deal of attention paid to "the timing, sequencing, and interaction of specific political-economic processes" (Thelen, 1999, p. 374). For the historical school, interests and objectives are created in institutional contexts and are not separable from them (Hall & Taylor, 1996;Thies, 2001), in contrast to rationalist approaches that consider preferences to be exogenous to institutions. Historical approaches emphasize the frequency with which institutions produce unintended consequences, in contrast to the rationalist view that institutions persist when they serve the functions they were created to perform (Pierson, 2000;Steinmo, Thelen, & Longstreth, 1992).…”