Gary Winslett

When states face a regulatory difference that impedes commerce between them, they have a range of options to choose from in how to pursue regulatory cooperation on that issue. They may attempt to unilaterally impose their position, attempt to negotiate binding agreements, promote mutual recognition, utilize networked governance, create private standards, rely on business self-regulation, or choose not to pursue cooperation. Each of these choices has implications for the commerce and international relations on that issue, and so the choice of policy route is of vital importance. This article builds on lobbying, regulation, and trade scholarship to advance a theory that explains how states choose a regulatory cooperation pathway.

Thesis advisor: David A. DeeseCross-national differences in regulation have become the most significant barrier to international trade. My dissertation attempts to explain why states sometimes choose to reduce these regulatory trade barriers but at other times choose to maintain or increase them. To do this, I examine the international negotiation over regulatory trade barriers in three in-depth case studies, one from each of the three main areas of the international trade in goods: manufacturing, agriculture, and high-technology. The first investigates consumer safety, labor-related domestic content, and environmental regulations in the trade in automobiles in North America and the European Union. The second analyzes mad-cow safety regulations and the trade in beef between the United States and Japan. The third examines intellectual property regulations and the trade in pharmaceuticals between the United States and India. I contend that the best way to explain this variation is by ...

Whereas tariffs were once the main barrier to international trade, cross-national differences in regulation now constitute the most significant impediment to trade and are therefore the centerpiece issues in contemporary trade negotiations. That change has profound implications for the global economy and for international political economy scholarship. This article explains how that change occurred in order to explore how the incorporation of regulation affects trade and illuminate the politics that surround the negotiation over these regulatory trade barriers. As tariffs and other non-regulatory measures were reduced, the extent to which cross-national differences in regulation impeded trade became more apparent, especially to multinational firms which pushed for attenuations of these regulatory trade barriers. Once regulations became the subject of trade negotiations in the 1980s, civil society groups with a vested interested in those regulations became involved in trade politics to a greater degree than ever before. These developments have shaped the major trade negotiations underway today and are likely to remain at the center of trade politics for the foreseeable future.

Mass public opinion has generally been presumed to have little or no impact on American trade policy. I argue against this presumption. I assert that mass public opinion significantly affects US trade policy by shaping the way the two parties compete over that trade policy. When public opinion is unbalanced, the competition between the parties is likely to resemble a bidding war. When public opinion is balanced but split in a partisan manner the competition is likely to descend into Manichean conflict. When public opinion is balanced but split in a non‐partisan manner, the competition is likely to be characterised by political actors seeking to maintain the support of their core constituencies. To examine this relationship, I investigate three cases: the push to punish China over Tiananmen Square in 1989–90, the ratification of NAFTA in 1992–93 and the process through which President Bush was granted trade promotion authority in 2001–02.

The expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA) in 2015 was the most successful attempt at trade liberalization under the auspices of the WTO since its inception in 1995. Its success makes it a template for other trade liberalization efforts. In this article, I explain how the ITA expansion came to pass and explicate the contours of the template it provides. I highlight four factors that were crucial to the ITA expansion's successful completion: a narrower scope without a single undertaking approach, a negotiating group that contained many but not all WTO members, a focus on tariffs rather than non-tariff barriers, and avoiding a nationalistic opposition. I conclude by discussing what lessons these factors and the ITA expansion suggest for other ongoing trade negotiations such as the Environmental Goods Agreements (EGA).

This article addresses how transnational groups affect the security relationship between the states they reside in. I argue that this is determined by the differential threat perceptions of the host states. If the host states both consider the group to be a threat, the group is a shared problem and policy toward the group becomes an arena for cooperation for the two states. However, if one state views the group as a threat and the other does not, policy toward the group becomes an arena for conflict between them. I test this hypothesis with a comparative case study analysis of Turkey’s relationships with the United States, Syria, and Iran vis-a-vis the Kurds after the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA) in 2015 was the most successful attempt at trade liberalization under the auspices of the WTO since its inception in 1995. Its success makes it a template for other trade liberalization efforts. In this article, I explain how the ITA expansion came to pass and explicate the contours of the template it provides. I highlight four factors that were crucial to the ITA expansion’s successful completion: a narrower scope without a single undertaking approach, a negotiating group that contained many but not all WTO members, a focus on tariffs rather than non- tariff barriers, and avoiding a nationalistic opposition. I conclude by discussing what lessons these factors and the ITA expansion suggest for other ongoing trade negotiations such as the Environmental Goods Agreements (EGA).

When states face a regulatory difference that impedes commerce between them, they have a range of options to choose from in how to pursue regulatory cooperation on that issue. They may choose to unilaterally impose their position, attempt to negotiate binding agreements, promote mutual recognition, utilize networked governance, create private standards, rely on business self-regulation, or choose not to pursue cooperation. Each of these choices has implications for the commerce and international relations around that issue, and so the choice of policy route is of vital importance. This article builds on lobbying, regulation, and trade scholarship to advance a theory that explains how states choose a regulatory cooperation pathway.

Whereas tariffs were once the main barrier to international trade, cross-national differences in regulation now constitute the most significant impediment to trade and are therefore the centerpiece issues in contemporary trade negotiations. That change has profound implications for the global economy and for international political economy scholarship. This article explains how that change occurred in order to explore how the incorporation of regulation affects trade and illuminate the politics that surround the negotiation over these regulatory trade barriers. As tariffs and other non-regulatory measures were reduced, the extent to which cross-national differences in regulation impeded trade became more apparent, especially to multinational firms which pushed for attenuations of these regulatory trade barriers. Once regulations became the subject of trade negotiations in the 1980s, civil society groups with a vested interested in those regulations became involved in trade politics to a greater degree than ever before. These developments have shaped the major trade negotiations underway today and are likely to remain at the center of trade politics for the foreseeable future.