Democracy and International Trade: Britain, France, and the United States, 1860-1990

In this ambitious exploration of how foreign trade policy is made in democratic regimes, Daniel Verdier shows that special interests, party ideologues, and state officials and diplomats act as agents of the voters. Constructing a general theory in which existing theories (rent-seeking, median voting, state autonomy) function as partial explanations, he shows that trade institutions are not fixed entities but products of political competition.