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This paper proposes that the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), experienced a deepening/widening tradeoff: as their membership increased (greater width), their effectiveness in promoting trade between members/participants declined (lesser de facto depth). This proposition is tested using gravity models of bilateral trade, first separating the GATT and WTO, which are usually combined into a single variable, and then adding a width variable corresponding to each institution. The results show that (1) both regimes were the deepest, or the most trade effective, when they had the fewest member-states and (2) their trade effectiveness declined, eventually becoming statistically insignificant, as more countries joined. As a quantitative case study, this paper provides some of the first evidence consistent with a tradeoff between depth and width within international institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers a messaging strategy to shift immigration preferences, arguing that if citizen attitudes in this issue-area build from several dimensions, then a positive message related to each dimension should move attitudes in a more favorable direction. It tests the first part using original survey data with directly comparable questions about whether immigration hurts/helps American culture/the economy/national security, providing evidence that all three dimensions currently support the preferences of voting-age citizens. It tests the second part by randomly presenting another sample with different messages about how labor immigration strengthens national security, creates new jobs, or enhances culture, finding that all three reduce anti-immigration attitudes with significant effects even within groups that are more opposed to immigration (namely, white Americans, those with less education, and partisan Republicans). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how government compensation programs like unemployment insurance and worker training may influence citizen attitudes about immigration openness. It considers several different arguments, including the proposition that social welfare programs may induce less‐educated citizens to feel more negatively about their class identity, thus pushing them toward an exclusionary national identity with greater opposition to immigration openness. Using data from the International Social Survey Program's 2013 National Identity module with more than 20,000 respondents from 24 developed democracies, it reports that greater government compensation can be associated with less supportive attitudes for the least educated with a diminishing negative effect for more educated citizens. Consistent with an identity shift argument for why less‐educated citizens might become more hostile toward immigration openness with greater government compensation, it also reports that greater compensation is associated with a more exclusionary national identity for less‐educated citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under capital mobility, governments face a political choice: hold an autonomous monetary policy with currency instability or stabilize exchange rates with the sacrifice of policy autonomy. This article examines what domestic political factors led the advanced industrial democracies to choose an autonomous monetary policy and what factors led them instead to choose stable exchange rates in the post-Bretton Woods era. Leftist-led governments have opted for an autonomous loose fiscal-tight monetary policy mix associated with exchange rate instability. Rightist-led governments have chosen a tight fiscal-loose monetary policy mix associated with exchange rate stability. These results are important because they help reestablish partisan agency in terms of monetary-exchange rate policy making, even under the structural constraint of international capital mobility.

Political economy research shows that more democratic governments generally have more open trade policies with more flexible exchange rate regimes, yet political behavior theory argues that citizens do not think of foreign economic policy as salient and do not cast their votes considering such issues. This note investigates the puzzle about how democracies could have different foreign economic policies than autocracies if citizens do not vote based on these international issues. Using a political model with two possible ways for societal actors to influence state policy (electoral and/or special interest pressure), it first considers how voting based on salient domestic outcomes like inflation and unemployment may lead democratic governments towards more open trade and flexible exchange rates. Second, if more societal groups are able to lobby as special interests in more democratic regimes, then governments may also be pushed toward these same foreign economic policies. Thus, there is no fundamental contradiction between the political economy empirical results and the political behavior theory, although scholars need to adjust their theories to explain foreign economic policy differences across political regime type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders the argument that as labor immigration policy opens, it must also become more restrictive in terms of immigrant rights. After discussing this tradeoff logic, positing a negative relationship between external (numbers) and internal (rights) labor migration policy, it then extends the underlying political model to show that when accounting for the lobbying pressure of firms seeking high skill labor, a very different expectation emerges. This political accommodation argument predicts a positive relationship between external and internal migration policy, or that policy related to labor immigration openness and immigrant rights should advance together, although not necessarily quickly or at the same rate. It then tests these competing propositions using a new dataset that sorts labor migration policy changes among 38 advanced industrial democracies from 1995 to 2016 into these two dimensions, finding a significant positive relationship between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]