This chapter traces the evolution of American interests in external property rights from the American Revolution to the present day. It examines the United States’ colonial experience in the Philippines, highlighting the challenges of implementing effective property rights reforms and the prioritization of other economic interests over property rights. The chapter identifies a pivotal shift in the 1980s toward prioritizing property rights abroad, influenced by the lobbying efforts of American firms and the growing salience of the trade deficit. It presents original data involving over a dozen government agencies, 160 countries, and more than 340 unique activities, illustrating the extensive scope and scale of United States’ efforts to enhance property rights globally through a multifaceted approach encompassing international treaties, domestic development programs, and bureaucratic initiatives.

This chapter presents qualitative case studies of the dramatically different political dynamics of TPP and TTIP negotiations. Why was lobbying so much more contentious over TPP while lobbying over TTIP was muted and almost entirely in favor of the agreement? The chapter traces the development of industry and labor union positions on each agreement, showing how the effects of endowments-based, inter-industry trade on the basis of comparative advantage (much more prevalent with TPP partners) serves to unify industries and unions around their particular position, facilitating strong collective action. With TTIP, the chapter shows how internationally engaged firms were highly motivated to lobby in favor of increased market access and the removal of regulatory barriers, while domestic-oriented firms either sat out of the political process entirely or formed cross-sectoral ad hoc coalitions. These cases elucidate how and why actors came to these decisions.

This chapter assesses the effects of intra-industry trade on lobbying in the EU. It includes the results of analysis of an original dataset of EU-based lobbying over several trade agreements. First, the chapter briefly discusses the nature of trade policy in the EU, and then surveys the literature on the politics of trade in Europe, with a focus on the state of our knowledge about the character of political coalitions and the involvement of industry associations and individual firms in the trade policymaking process. Second, the chapter discusses the role of intra-industry trade in the EU and presents an argument about the way that IIT has eroded the ability of European industry associations to lobby jointly over trade policy. Third, the chapter introduces the dataset used to assess the argument and discusses the quantitative analysis and results. The results support the theory developed in this book and demonstrate that IIT affects societal coalitions across diverse institutional contexts.

This chapter assesses the book's theory about the effects of intra-industry trade on lobbying in the US case. First, the chapter examines the changing dynamics of trade politics in the United States during the postwar period, and it demonstrates the ways that these dynamics diverge from what is predicted by the classic trade models. Second, the chapter presents testable hypotheses to assess the influence of intra-industry trade on the structure of trade politics coalitions. In the remaining sections, I test my hypotheses and discuss my results and their implications for the politics of international trade. Using firm-level data on trade policy lobbying expenditures for 459 US manufacturing industries, I show that industry associations become less active in their lobbying efforts, relative to individual firms, as intra-industry trade increases. Furthermore, I find that this effect is stronger in import-competing sectors than in strong exporting sectors. This suggests that in import-competing sectors, exporting firms break away from protectionist industry associations to lobby alone for liberalization.

The book opens with some compelling examples of puzzling episodes in recent trade policy negotiations. I question why Americans were largely unaware of TTIP, while the TPP became a lightning rod for controversy and went down in flames on day one of the Trump presidency. I also discuss the dramatic rise in firm-level lobbying over these and other trade agreements, despite the IPE literature’s longstanding assumption that firms primarily engage in trade politics collectively via industry associations or class-based coalitions. Then I briefly introduce my theoretical story, which makes sense of these and other puzzles. I discuss the state of our understanding of trade politics in developed democracies before presenting the plan of the book to follow.

The introduction outlines the complex relationship between American foreign relations and the PR industry, revealing a hidden hand of influence on US foreign relations. It explains the significance of the relationship, looking at the implications of the relationship for democracy, and outlining why the relationship has been historically controversial. The introduction also considers the definition of PR, notably contrasting it with advertising and lobbying. Finally, it delineates the main ways PR firms engaged with foreign relations: through support for private groups of American citizens, through support for corporate interests (domestic and foreign), and through support for governmental interests (domestic and foreign).

This research explores the extent of private law and the influence of private entities in healthcare in Europe. The three-part analysis reveals a complex interplay between different health system structures, laws, and influences. First, it highlights four distinctions between Europe and the United States (US) concerning universal health care, the role of government, private insurance, and the legal framework for disputes. Second, it considers the role of private law in resolving disputes in Europe. Ultimately, this research calls for further research to close those gaps in the literature concerning the number and scope of health disputes governed under contract law and the laws that health lobbies have influenced. Third, it emphasizes the influence of private healthcare lobbies in Europe and provides a case study of their influence on the United Kingdom’s (UK) health landscape.

This chapter asks how a politician can tie the amount of central government resources a group receives to the amount of electoral support it delivers. I argue that when a party is dominant, like Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), its members will be able to gain the most votes, conditional on resources delivered, by pitting groups against each other in a competition for resources. This part of the theory draws on prior work that introduces tournaments to political science. I explain that in such a competition, politicians create the perception that groups will be ranked according to their loyalty in the last election and prizes (in the form of resource allocations) will be awarded on the basis of rank. By structuring resources so that the highest-ranked group receives the largest prize, politicians can encourage competition for this position. This drives up their electoral support, in all groups with a chance of attaining this position. This chapter fleshes out the intuition behind a tournament, the mechanics of how tournaments can be pulled off in different settings, and elucidates their implications for longstanding questions of interest, including the sources of incumbency advantage and opposition weakness, the degree of congruence between policy preferences and vote choice, and whether all democratic competition is created equal.

Chapters 6–8 use a comprehensive new dataset on the universe of Japanese municipalities in existence between 1980 and 2014 to examine whether tournaments are being conducted within tournament-possible electoral districts. Using regression specifications designed to minimize the influence of confounders, weigh up evidence for rival theories, and take advantage of distinctive features of the two electoral systems Japan has used, I test two hypotheses. First, I show that LDP politicians make the amounts of money municipalities in their electoral districts receive after Lower House elections conditional on where each municipality places in a rank order of municipalities. Second, I show that the difference in amounts received by municipalities at different ranks is larger at higher ranks, which is also evidence of a tournament. In addition to regression analyses, I consider two of the theory’s microfoundations which are that LDP politicians are capable of lobbying bureaucrats and voters are aware money is tied to support, respectively. Case studies, anecdotes, interviews, election manifestos, and voter surveys offer evidence for these microfoundations. Finally, I use the logic of a tournament to explain why prior studies of the relationship between votes and money in Japan reached strikingly different conclusions.

The homeowners’ movements in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen differ by both the scope of their property rights claims and the concomitant ways in which they claim those rights. The leading homeowners in Beijing are political entrepreneurs, devoting themselves more to systemic change and even Chinese democracy than to the self-governance of their individual neighborhoods. The leading homeowners in Shenzhen are social entrepreneurs who navigate through the social, legal, and bureaucratic maze to claim absolute homeownership sovereignty. The defining characteristic of homeowners in Shanghai is respect for laws and rules.