Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Open Trade for Sale: Lobbying by Productive Exporting Firms

政治学博士论文研究：开放贸易出售：生产性出口公司的游说

• 批准号: 1264090
• 负责人: Kosuke Imai
• 金额: $ 2.25万
• 依托单位: Princeton University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-03-15 至 2015-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1264090&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Political; Science

Existing theories in international political economy predict conflicting political interests with respect to trade policy at the industry level: import-competing industries want protection from foreign competition whereas exporting industries demand open trade. However, in most countries some firms export while others, facing competition from imported products, provide goods only to their domestic markets even within the same industry. Who are the political actors supporting trade liberalization, and who are the supporters of protection when the distinction between import-competing industries versus export industries has become unclear? To explain this, the proposed project considers manufacturing firms as important political actors unlike other studies that consider them mainly as economic agents. A detailed study of such political behavior would underscore a new source of pressure faced by governments when setting trade policies.Intellectual Merit: This is one of the first projects in the field of international political economy that tests whether there is an effect of lobbying by exporting firms on trade liberalization. The project aims to identify the political mechanism by creating a new lobbying dataset that automatically extracts and updates detailed lobbying activities of all manufacturing firms, which became available under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. Any firm that lobbied at least once will then be matched with firms in multiple finance databases in order to identify the trade policies in which they have a direct economic interest.Firms produce different products even when they belong to a same industry. For example, some textile firms produce shirts made of wool while others make them with linen. Consequently, it is hard to assume that these firms would have same preference over trade policy. This project shows that the incentives of exporting firms to lobby can be stronger than those of their import-competing counterparts when products are sufficiently different. Product differentiation implies that lobbying will benefit only a small number of firms that actually produce the different products in question. As a result, the theory predicts that exporting firms are more likely to lobby overcoming their collective problems. The dataset would be used to test whether a high degree of product differentiation within an industry is associated with 1) active lobbying by exporting firms and 2) trade liberalization. Broader Impacts: In the era of globalization, multinational corporations that control the movements of goods, services and people have become important political agents in setting trade, immigration, environment, and security policies. With the new insights offered by this project, social scientists and policy makers will be able to understand under what condition producers of goods and services can actively influence decisions made by governments around the world. The entire dataset would be updated quarterly and will be publicly available. The lobbying dataset, a panel of any foreign and domestic entities who have lobbied the U.S. government since 1999, would allow social scientists to explore research topics related to lobbying such as defense, health, and energy.

国际政治经济学中的现有理论预测了在行业层面上对贸易政策的政治利益相互矛盾的：竞争性行业希望保护外国竞争，而出口行业需要开放贸易。但是，在大多数国家 /地区，有些公司出口，而其他公司则面临进口产品的竞争，即使在同一行业内，也只能为其国内市场提供商品。谁是支持贸易自由化的政治参与者，当进口竞争产业与出口行业之间的区别已经不清楚时，谁是保护的支持者？为了解释这一点，拟议的项目认为制造业公司是重要的政治参与者，与其他认为主要是经济代理商的研究不同。对这种政治行为的详细研究将强调政府制定贸易政策时面临的新压力来源。智能优点：这是国际政治经济学领域的第一个项目之一，该项目测试了是否通过向贸易自由化出口公司而进行游说的影响。该项目旨在通过创建一个新的游说数据集来确定政治机制，该数据集自动提取和更新所有制造公司的详细游说活动，根据1995年的《游说披露法》，该公司可用于与贸易策略相匹配的任何公司在贸易策略中与企业相匹配，即使他们的经济范围与他们的经济相同。例如，一些纺织公司生产由羊毛制成的衬衫，而另一些纺织公司则用亚麻制成。因此，很难假设这些公司对贸易政策有相同的偏好。该项目表明，在产品足够不同时，将公司出口到游说的激励措施比其进口竞争的同行的激励措施更强大。产品差异化意味着游说只会使实际生产不同产品的少数公司受益。结果，该理论预测出口企业更有可能游说克服其集体问题。该数据集将用于测试行业内部的高度产品差异化是否与1）通过出口公司和2）贸易自由化相关。更广泛的影响：在全球化时代，控制商品，服务和人民运动的跨国公司在制定贸易，移民，环境和安全政策方面已成为重要的政治推动者。借助该项目提供的新见解，社会科学家和政策制定者将能够理解在哪种条件的商品和服务生产者可以积极影响世界各地政府的决策。整个数据集将每季度更新，并将公开使用。自1999年以来游说美国政府游说的任何外国和国内实体的小组游说数据集将允许社会科学家探索与游说相关的研究主题，例如国防，健康和能源。