Andreas Dür

University of Salzburg · Department of Political Science

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for the last twenty years. A large literature has studied various aspects of this phenomenon. Until very recently, this literature has treated all PTAs as equal. However, PTAs differ significantly in terms of design. In this paper, we present a new dataset on the design of trade agreement...

Through which mechanism do interest groups shape public opinion on concrete policies? I propose three hypotheses that distinguish between the effect of the arguments conveyed by interest groups and the effect of interest groups as source cues. Two survey experiments on the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the 2015 Paris A...

Many citizens, politicians, and political activists voice concern about the political influence of business in the European Union. But do business interests really pull the strings in Brussels? Contrary to expectations, this book shows that business interests are no more influential than other interests in shaping contemporary EU policies. Andreas...

Much research has tried to measure the competitiveness of territorial units such as countries and subnational regions. We propose new measures of subnational trade competitiveness that reflect the economic focus of regions on their country’s comparative advantage. Our approach starts with data on the revealed comparative advantage of countries at t...

The consequences of economic globalization on electoral outcomes have recently become a prominent topic of research. We complement the emerging literature on this topic by studying whether changes in a subnational region's trade competitiveness affect the incumbent's vote share in that region. Using a novel dataset that relates subnational trade co...

Which companies gain and which companies lose from trade agreements? In contrast to a view that sees the largest companies as the main beneficiaries of trade agreements, we argue that medium-sized companies gain the most from them. Moreover, we examine whether more capital-intensive and more diversified companies benefit more than other firms. Our...

How do actors react to the politicisation of trade policy? This special issue aims to tackle this question, considering a broad set of actors including members of parliament, political parties, regional and national governments, interest groups, and the European Commission. To set the stage for the contributions to the special issue, in this introd...

We argue that legislators’ trade attitudes reflect constituents’ economic interests. Concretely, we expect that legislators from districts that are highly competitive in international trade should be more supportive of trade agreements than legislators from noncompetitive districts. The strength of this relationship should be lower in multimember d...

What explains a preference for one trading partner over another? We present three broad answers to this question that focus on economic interests, geopolitical concerns, and political ideology. Empirically, we address the question by investigating the trade partner preferences of citizens and members of parliament in Latin America. With respect to...

We argue that legislators’ trade attitudes reflect constituents’ economic interests. Concretely, we expect that legislators from districts that are highly competitive in international trade should be more supportive of trade agreements than legislators from non-competitive districts. The strength of this relationship should be lower in multi-member...

How does the politicisation of trade policy affect the lobbying strategies chosen by interest groups? Several studies have shown that business associations tend to focus more on inside lobbying and citizen groups more on outside lobbying. We argue that politicisation makes this difference in lobbying strategy even more pronounced. Facing an issue t...

Interest groups play a key role in the political economy of preferential trade agreements (PTAs). Their support for or opposition to a planned PTA tends to be crucial in determining the fate of PTAs. But which PTAs receive support from (which) interest groups? Clearly, the design of a PTA, that is, which types of provisions are (not) included in th...

Many international agreements of the European Union establish what we call joint bodies (JBs). Examples of such bodies include joint committees, joint sub-committees, and association and cooperation councils. Over the years, the EU has built an impressive global web of JBs, which bring together EU and third-country executive officials and play a ke...

Why are highly educated people more supportive of international trade? Two competing explanations exist for this empirical finding. On the one hand, the economic interest approach suggests that the highly educated realize that trade can benefit them economically. On the other hand, the ideational perspective argues that this relationship arises bec...

This volume takes stock of international political science research on the various facets of de-globalisation. It follows the volume ‘Globalisation. State of Research and Perspectives’ in our book series ‘International Political Economy’ published by Nomos (Schirm (ed.) 2006). The aim of this volume is to first review the state of international res...

The extent to which intellectual property rights (IPRs) are regulated varies strongly across preferential trade agreements (PTAs). What explains this variation? We argue that deep IPRs are mainly found in PTAs characterized by large differences in power and innovative capacity across member states. Computational text analysis on the IPR sections in...

Much research has tried to measure the competitiveness of territorial units such as countries and subnational regions. We propose new measures of subnational trade competitiveness that reflect the economic focus of regions on their country’s comparative advantage. Our approach starts with data on the revealed comparative advantage of countries at t...

In many international agreements, the European Union (EU) sets up joint bodies (JBs) such as "association councils" or "joint committees." These JBs bring together EU and third-country officials for agreement implementation. To date, we know surprisingly little about the degree of discretion the European Commission enjoys in them. Drawing on a prin...

How does elite communication affect citizens' attitudes towards trade agreements? Building on a growing literature on context factors influencing public opinion about trade and trade agreements, we argue that citizens rely on cues provided by political elites, especially political parties, when forming their views towards these agreements. Such cue...

This special issue advances research on the political economy of the EU. Political economy research investigates the interaction between politics and economics, that is, how political factors influence economic outcomes such as trade or economic growth and how economic outcomes affect politics. In this introduction to the special issue, we first pr...

Two recent developments have the potential to fundamentally alter the conventional view of EU trade policy-making: the emergence of global value chains (GVCs) and the recent backlash against globalization. In this paper we summarize the conventional wisdom after which we delineate the main expectations derived from the GVC and the globalization-bac...

The globalization of production is changing the political economy of trade policy-making: Traditional supporters of free trade (exporters seeking market access in foreign countries) are joined by new actors (companies needing intermediates from abroad for their production processes) in their lobbying efforts for trade liberalization. Multinational...

Table A‐1: Wording of the TTIP survey experiment (British case) Table A‐2: Summary statistics Table A‐3: Number of valid responses by treatment and country Table A‐4: Regression results (Hypothesis 1) Table A‐5: Regression results (Hypothesis 1), contd. Table A‐6: Regression results (Hypothesis 2) Table A‐7: Regression results (Hypothesis 3)...

Both global value chains and trade in differentiated goods have become increasingly important in the international economy. We argue that these two developments interact in changing the political economy of trade. For finished goods, product differentiation facilitates trade liberalization because the adjustment costs of liberalization are lower wh...

This paper investigates variation in the design of labor provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) by focusing on the power of trade unions, the role of government partisanship, and the relative strength of skilled labor. We expect strong trade unions and left-leaning governments to be associated with more, and more far-reaching labor prov...

This research note presents a new dataset on the speed of tariff liberalization in sixty-one preferential trade agreements (PTAs) signed by fifty states and regional economic organizations over the period 1995 to 2013. We use this dataset to test prominent arguments concerning the impact of intra-industry trade and global value chains on the politi...

Environment and trade are increasingly linked through preferential trade agreements. Despite the encompassing nature of environmental provisions in trade agreements, studies on causes and consequences of the trade and environment linkage are scarce. A main cause hindering research in this area is the lack of data. By dint of this research note we i...

This research agenda starts from the observation that in most political science research, the salience which citizens, interest groups, policymakers and the media attach to policymaking processes on specific policies is usually measured for just one actor type. As a consequence, it is difficult to assess the extent to which the salience attribution...

What explains differences in the lobbying behaviour of interest groups? And what consequences do these differences have for the access that interest groups can gain to decision-makers and the influence that they can exert on policy outcomes? Building on an unprecedented amount of empirical evidence on lobbying in Europe, this book puts forward a d...

Commercial policy has a strong negotiated component, with many international trade negotiations aiming at the liberalization of trade. Why do we see these trade negotiations, that is, why do countries even aim to liberalize trade? What explains whether countries engage in multilateral or bilateral and plurilateral negotiations? And how do countries...

Business lobbying is widespread in the European Union (EU). But because not all lobbying is successful, the question arises: when does business win and when does it lose in the context of legislative policy-making in the EU? We argue that business actors are, overall, less successful than citizen groups in the European policy process. However, they...

Why are legislative proposals closer to the positions of some organized interests than of others? The literature proposes that policy-makers are attentive to the demands of lobbyists that provide relevant information. At the same time, being part of a policy community is also claimed to enable lobbyists to shape policy formulation. We argue that bo...

Existing research indicates that different dimensions of the design of international institutions are interrelated. In particular, deep agreements have been shown to be more flexible. We make two contributions to this literature. On the one hand, we argue and empirically show that the positive relationship between depth and flexibility holds for pr...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for more than two decades, with the negotiations for a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and a Trans-Pacific Partnership being just the tip of the iceberg. This volume addresses some of the most pressing issues related to the surge of these agreements. It includes chapters wr...

The growing number of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) is one of the hallmarks of the current global economy. Within and across most, if not all, regions of the world, governments have concluded numerous new agreements or have revised previously signed ones. According to the World Trade Organization (WTO), more than 350 PTAs are currently in fo...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs), defined as agreements that liberalise trade between two or more countries but that do not extend this liberalisation to all countries (or at least to a majority of countries), are mushrooming around the globe. The European Union (EU) is currently negotiating trade agreements with countries such as India, Japan,...

The proliferation of bilateral and regional trade agreements has arguably been the main change to the international trading system since the end of the Uruguay Round in the mid-1990s. We argue that investment discrimination plays a major role in this development. Preferential trade agreements can lead to investment discrimination because of tariff...

Proper sampling is the foundation for all scientific enquiry aimed at making generalizable claims about a wider set of cases. Indeed, inferential statistical analysis presupposes representative samples and units of analysis that can be considered as independent observations. Establishing a sample of issues on which lobbying may take place, which is...

This article outlines both the overall structure of the INTEREURO Project (Comparative Research on Interest Group Politics in Europe) and the theoretical foci, research activities and data sets generated by its several modules. We provide this description for two purposes. First, it provides a necessary backdrop for understanding the remaining essa...

The measurement of the political success of organized interests continues to be among the thornier tasks faced by political scientists. The methodological challenges include determining the preferences of key actors and the extent to which these are satisfied by the policy outcome. We examine how interest group success has been measured in the lite...

In 2011 and 2012, 31 countries and the European Union (EU) signed the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which envisages stricter standards for the transnational enforcement of intellectual property rights. Despite strong sup-port for the agreement from business groups, the anti-ACTA campaign that was initiated by an initially small number...

Large variation exists in the extent to which national interest groups focus on European Union (EU) legislation and carry out their political activities in Brussels and Strasbourg. What explains this variation? We propose a series of hypotheses that suggest that business groups, and groups active in policy areas with high EU competence, are more Eu...

What explains a party's dual decision about whether to endorse a referendum on an international treaty and whether to support that treaty in a referendum campaign? Relying on an original game of second-order electoral competition, this article argues that the relative likelihood of a party endorsing a referendum is highest at the beginning and end...

What explains a political party's decision to call for or speak out against a referen-dum on an international treaty? Treating referendums as second-order elections with an uncertain outcome, we propose a probabilistic game of electoral competition between government and opposition. Among the expectations derived from our model are that a party is...

Early theorists of European integration expected that political actors such as interest groups would shift their political activities towards the new centre, leading to further political integration in Europe. Half a century later, we assess this expectation and �nd large variation in the extent to which national interest groups focus on European U...

Early theorists of European integration expected that political actors such as interest groups would shift their political activities towards the new centre, leading to further political integration in Europe. Half a century later, we assess this expectation and find large variation in the extent to which na-tional interest groups focus on European...

Votes, Vetoes and the Political Economy of International Trade Agreements. By Edward D.Mansfield and Helen V.Milner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 240p. $60.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. - Volume 11 Issue 2 - Andreas Dür

Early theorists of European integration expected that political actors such as interest groups would “shift their loyalties, expectations and political activities toward a new centre” (Haas 1958: 16), leading to further political integration in Europe. Half a century later, we assess this expectation and find huge variation in the extent to whi...

States design some international institutions more flexibly than others. What explains this variation? Focusing on preferential trade agreements, we argue that different aspects of institutional design are interdependent. In particular, we posit that deep agreements create an incentive for states to add more flexibility, which can take the form of...

The last two decades have seen a major expansion in the scope of the European Union's foreign economic policies. Repeatedly, EU member states both formally and informally have delegated significant powers to carry out these policies to the European Commission and other agents at the European level. What consequences does this delegation of competen...

What explains variation across national interest groups in their amount of lobbying on legislative proposals in the European Union (EU)? We present an argument that leads to the expectation that resource-rich associations engage in more lobbying on EU legislation than other associations. Moreover, we expect business associations to have privileged...

Rational choice (RC) is currently the dominant research programme in political science. This contribution briefly presents this research programme and then tackles criticisms concerning 1.) the empirical plausibility of the rationality assumption, 2.) the results of empirical RC research and 3.) the supposedly lacking ability of RC to prescribe act...

Rational choice (RC) is currently the dominant research programme in political science. This contribution briefly presents this research programme and then tackles criticisms concerning 1.) the empirical plausibility of the rationality assumption, 2.) the results of empirical RC research and 3.) the supposedly lacking ability of RC to prescribe act...

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have been proliferating for the last twenty years. A large literature has studied various aspects of this phenomenon. Until recently, however, many large-N studies have paid only scant attention to variation across PTAs in terms of content and design. Our contribution to this literature is a new dataset on the d...

In the introduction to this collection on the principal–agent approach and the European Union's (EU) foreign economic policies we briefly present the EU's institutional structure for policy-making in trade, monetary, development and international competition and financial policy. We also offer some data on the extent of the EU's involvement in the...

The once-distinct literatures on European Union politics and negotiation theory are increasingly interlinked, with each drawing upon and contributing to the other. This collection aims to stimulate even more, and more systematic, research on negotiations in the EU. In particular, it presents a state of the art of the literature at the intersection...

We argue that in intergovernmental negotiations in the European Union, large Member States, countries with a good alternative to negotiated agreement and governments facing domestic constraints are more likely to resort to a hard bargaining strategy than less powerful Member States. We test this prediction with data from a survey with high-level of...

I argue that the intra-European integration of services trade, even if it threatens to impose costs on third countries in the short run, on average makes the European Union (EU) more open to foreign service providers. The reasoning is that third countries are likely to respond to discrimination in ways that ensure continued openness of the EU. This...

We introduce a series of arguments that explain how country characteristics influence the choice of bargaining strategies. The country characteristics that we consider are a country's power resources, preferences, and culture. We derive a series of hypotheses from these variables, and present their implications for intergovernmental negotiations in...

This research note summarises the findings from a survey that asked Irish associations about their lobbying activity with respect to European Union legislation. The authors received 164 responses after having contacted 401 associations. The resulting data show that Irish associations engage in substantial legislative lobbying, also at the EU level....

We introduce a series of arguments that explain how country characteristics influence the choice of bargaining strategies. The country characteristics that we consider are a country's power resources, preferences, and culture. We derive a series of hypotheses from these variables, and present their implications for intergovernmental negotiations in...

Since 1990 the number of preferential trade agreements has increased rapidly. Our argument explains this phenomenon, known as the new regionalism, as a result of competition for market access. Exporters that face trade diversion because of their exclusion from a preferential trade agreement concluded by foreign countries push their governments into...

Why did some political parties in the EU member states support and others oppose a facultative referendum on the Constitutional Treaty? We argue that electoral competition played a major role in determining how parties positioned themselves with respect to the desirability of a referendum. Parties that expected electoral gains supported and those t...

How much influence do interest groups have on policy outcomes in the EU? This question is highly relevant for both debates on the democratic legitimacy of the EU and our understanding of policy-making processes in this entity. Nevertheless, because of the difficulties inherent in measuring interest group influence, it has been addressed by only a s...