Who Preaches Protectionism? Economic and Electoral Influences on Trade-Related Position Taking in the Senate

Existing studies of Congressional behavior devote little attention to understanding legislators' trade-related position taking outside the context of roll call votes. Using a new dataset on bill sponsorship that spans fifteen congresses, the author explores the factors that affect a senator's propensity to introduce protectionist trade bills, including state-level manufacturing characteristics, economic cycles and electoral vulnerability. The results provide support for a number of the prominent economic-based explanations for trade policy preferences, including the Heckscher-Ohlin and Ricardo-Viner models, and also draw attention to several additional economic and political influences on policy outcomes. Beyond trade politics, these findings have implications for the expanding body of research on bill sponsorship as well as the literature on the role of Congress in U.S. foreign policy making.Master of Art

The Repercussions of Realignment: United States–China Interdependence and Exchange Rate Politics

Analysts generally believe that a weaker currency primarily benefits a country's manufacturing and primary goods sectors. However, many of these industries—and the elected officials who represent them—frequently oppose legislation designed to combat the dollar's overvaluation relative to the Chinese yuan. I argue that legislators hesitate to take aggressive action on the exchange rate issue because doing so could lead to a disruption of the broader United States–China economic relationship. The threat of an economic conflict emerges as a particularly important consideration in the context of currency bills, where proposed legislation is linked to trade policy and other areas of international economic regulation. A Bayesian statistical analysis of legislative behavior on two recent exchange rate bills in the US Congress provides overall support for my hypotheses. Legislators with ties to business interests that rely heavily on the Chinese economy were more likely to oppose the bills, while the strongest support came from legislators representing import-competing domestic producers. The results highlight the ways that economic interdependence shapes bilateral exchange rate politics in particular, and United States–China interactions more generally

Who Promotes Protection? Economic and Electoral Influences on Trade-Related Position Taking in the Senate

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Large-N Bill Positions Data from MapLight.org: What Can We Learn from Interest Groups’ Publicly Observable Legislative Positions?

The transparency organization MapLight records instances of organizations taking positions for and against legislation in Congress. The dataset comprises some 130,000 such positions taken on thousands of bills between the 109th and 115th Congresses (2005–2018). The depth and breadth of these data potentially give them wide applicability for answering questions about interest group behavior and influence as well as legislative politics more broadly. However, the coverage and content of the data are affected by aspects of MapLight’s research process. This article introduces the MapLight dataset and its potential uses, examines issues related to sampling and other aspects of MapLight’s research process, and explains how scholars can address these to make appropriate use of the data