The U.S.-China trade war and policy resilience

One can attribute the Trump administration's pursuit of a trade war against the People's Republic of China (PRC) to a range of variables, including its re-election hopes, commitment to protectionism as an economic weapon, fears about Beijing's pursuit of artificial intelligence, and broader strategic concerns about the global balance of power. This article argues that another explanation for President Donald J. Trump's ability to change trade policy towards China was the structural weaknesses of the trade policy regime that emerged at the end of the 1990s when Congress adopted Permanent Normal Trade Relations as a designation for free trade in July 1998 and the prc joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001. Those weaknesses owed much to the ways in which the United States initially framed the new trade regime with the prc and the limited, only partially conclusive, character of the debate that took place at the time. Despite the growth and embedding of supply chains between China and the United States, these inbuilt weaknesses contributed to the progressive erosion of the trade policy regime during the years that followed. Within this context, few constituencies were ready to lobby for the prc after January 2017 and the Trump administration faced little opposition to its change of trade policy

The Culture War and Issue Salience: An Analysis of American Sentiment on Traditional Moral Issues

Despite much talk of a culture war, scholars continue to argue over whether the American public is divided on cultural and social issues. Some of the most prominent work in this area, such as Fiorina's Culture War?, has rejected the idea. However, this work has in turn been criticized for focussing only on the distribution of attitudes within the American public and ignoring the possibility that the culture war may also be driven by the increasing strength with which sections of the population hold their opinions. This paper tests the strength, or saliency, hypothesis using individual-level over-time data and nonlinear regression. It finds (1) that there was a steady and significant increase in concern about traditional moral issues between the early 1980s and 2000, but (2) that the over-time increase was driven by an upward and equal shift in the importance attached to traditional moral issues by Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, evangelicals and non-evangelicals, and frequent and infrequent worshippers alike. While the first finding offers support for the saliency hypothesis and the culture war thesis, the second challenges the idea that Americans are engaged in a war over culture. Both findings enhance but also complicate our theoretical understanding of the culture war, and have important real-world consequences for American politics