Over the past fifty years, barriers to international trade have decreased substantially. A key source of this decline in protectionism has been the proliferation of agreements among countries to liberalize commerce. In this article, we analyze the domestic political conditions under which states...

International institutions that include an escape clause generate more durable and stable cooperative international regimes and are easier to achieve <italic>ex ante</italic>. The escape clause is endogenous in a model of repeated trade-barrier setting in the presence of symmetric, two-sided, political...