Why are some firms more successful than others in obtaining privileged treatment from their government? Trade policy, as an unusually targeted tool, offers a rich context to understand such questions of special-interest politics and corporate power. Studying decisions on anti-dumping petitions in the United States, we introduce a novel source of privileged treatment. We argue that firms with more linkages throughout the domestic economy enjoy a privileged political position. Benefits to these firms extend indirectly to a wider set of constituents, which allows firms to assemble broader coalitions and to portray protectionist policy as more than purely particularistic politics. We provide evidence for this argument by developing original measures of linkages between firms, derived from over 600,000 customer–supplier relationships among industries, matching them with data on anti-dumping petitions filed by US firms, written briefs filed by members of Congress on behalf of these firms, and the geographic distribution of industries. Our account identifies a new explanation of differences in the political influence of firms, underscores the relevance of domestic production networks in politics, and offers a novel perspective on cleavages and coalitions in trade politics. Our results also suggest that the expansion of global supply chains, long considered a hallmark of political power, has weakened the clout of some of the largest firms by limiting their domestic footprint.

Exchange rate manipulation—the active devaluation of a currency through intervention in the foreign exchange market—is a frequent trigger of international disputes. Yet it is not an obvious policy choice: as a blunt tool to boost export competitiveness, it is disliked by citizens and importers because of the loss of purchasing power it entails, and because it benefits those with investment abroad at the expense of those with savings at home. It is thus notable that a group of East Asian countries, from Japan and Korea to Thailand, undertake frequent and often large interventions to devalue their currencies. What explains their policy choice? We provide evidence that exchange rate depreciations are undertaken at the behest of export industries. Because lobbying activities in East Asian countries are not directly observable, we focus on Japan and Korea and construct a proxy measure of lobbying by exporters, drawing on news reports. We use machine learning to scale daily reports of industry demands in the two leading financial newspapers, the Japanese Nihon Keizai Shimbun and, in a robustness check, the Korean Hankyung, over twenty-five years. We find evidence that mounting public pressure by organized economic interest groups precedes intervention and induces currency depreciation.