International relations has often been treated as a separate discipline distinct from the other major fields in political science, namely American and comparative politics. A main reason for this distinction has been the claim that politics in the international system is radically different from...

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...

Conventional theories of the political economy of trade argue that industries in import-competing businesses favor protectionism, while multinational firms and export-dependent corporations advocate unconditional free trade. However, many multinational industries have recently advocated...

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...

In this article we bring together opposing international relations theories to better understand U.S. foreign policy, in particular foreign trade and aid. Using votes in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1979–2004, we explore different theoretical predictions about preferences for foreign...