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Delegation, Ratification, and U.S. Trade Policy

Why Divided Government Causes Lower Tariffs

Syracuse University

Recent research on executive-legislative relations concludes that divided government causes higher tariffs and inhibits international cooperation. I find that divided government leads to lower U.S. tariffs in the postwar period and that the theoretical connection between divided government and international cooperation is viable only as a special case. In the contemporary United States, trade policy preferences do not adhere to party lines: Democratic Congresses are more protectionist than Republican Congresses, but Democratic presidents are less protectionist than their Republican counterparts. The divergence of executive-legislative preferences is thus greater under unified government than under divided government. As a cross-national hypothesis, the claim that divided government inhibits international cooperation holds only if some special restrictions on partisan preferences are met. These conditions are unlikely to survive as generalizations about democratic polities, rendering implausible the connection between divided government and reduced international cooperation.

Comparative Political Studies, Vol. 35, No. 10, 1171-1197 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/001041402237947


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