Constituency systems, election proximity, special interests and a free trade agreement: the case of the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Japan

Kagitani, Koichi; Harimaya, Kozo

doi:10.1007/s10368-020-00463-5

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

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“…6 To control for the timing of the electoral cycle during which the vote takes place, I include the time until the next scheduled election (in fractions of years). This accounts for the tendency of lawmakers to become more protectionist with increasing election proximity (Conconi et al, 2014;Kagitani and Harimaya, 2020). Because right-wing parties are ideologically inclined to support trade liberalization whereas left-wing parties tend to oppose capitalist globalization (Milner and Judkins, 2004), I also control for the economic left-right position of a legislator's party.…”

Section: Control Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Moreover, scholars identified several important covariates such as ideology (measured by party membership) (Kahane, 1996), the chamber of parliament (Karol, 2007;Ehrlich, 2009), whether legislators belong to the same party as the president (Magee, 2010), and the foreign policy concerns of the US President (Milner and Tingley, 2011). In addition to these US-centered investigations, there exists a small number of single-case studies in Great Britain (Schonhardt-Bailey, 2003), Japan (Kagitani and Harimaya, 2020), Argentina (Murillo and Pinto, 2021), and Brazil (Campello and Urdinez, 2021) that demonstrated the effect of constituencies' economic interest on legislators' voting behavior.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Why do legislators rebel on trade agreements? The effect of constituencies’ economic interests

Stiller

2022

Eur. Pol. Sci. Rev.

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Most trade agreements are ratified with overwhelming support by legislators throughout the world. This lack of opposition is surprising given the strong distributional consequences of trade and the expectation of conventional political economy theory that parliamentary votes on trade policy should be closely contested between winners and losers of globalization. To analyze the driving forces behind legislators’ voting behavior while avoiding the obscuring effect of party discipline, I analyze under which circumstances legislators decide to rebel against their party’s position when voting on the ratification of trade agreements. I put forward two hypotheses: First, rebellions are more likely when the trade agreement is with a larger trading partner and when the liberalization through the agreement is more comprehensive. Second, legislators will rebel when their party’s position does not align with their constituency’s economic interests. These hypotheses are supported by a series of multinomial regression analyses based on an original dataset comprising votes of several thousand legislators from multiple countries on the ratification of trade agreements.

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Section: Control Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%