Trading Policy: Constituents and Political Party in U.S. Trade Policy

Abstract

Scholars have argued that constituent interests and political parties affect voting on trade policy legislation in the U.S. Congress. The existing empirical research on trade policy voting, however, has not utilized research designs that allow us to disentangle how constituents and parties affect legislative voting. In this paper we apply one-to-one matching research designs to compare the effects of constituency and party on trade policy voting in both the U.S. House and Senate. The research design allows us to account for a variety of different constituent factors that could influence voting, and then determine if party has any effect beyond constituent interests. The results suggest that party plays a significant role in legislative voting on trade policy once we account for constituency effects. Between 1824 and 1930, political party almost completely determines trade policy votes and although the effect of party is weaker since 1930 it is still significant. These results suggest that to understand the political economy of trade policy we need to incorporate the way that partisan politics affects trade policy.