How does government regulate the flow of international commerce? Standard models explain American trade policy as the result of either politically influential pressure groups demanding protection, or as the result of elected officials and bureaucrats supplying protection. These models provide only part of the picture. Conventional models, for example, cannot explain such diverse policy outcomes as long term quotas to protect sugar (1934), dairy products (1953), meat (1965), and petroleum (1959-73); nor can they explain shifts in negotiating authority away from the president and to the USTR in the 1988 Omnibus Trade Bill. In this Doctoral Dissertation Research Support project, the argument is presented that, contrary to the standard view, members of Congress in passing trade legislation face a problem of how to organize for collective action. Congress solves its internal decision making problems by delegating authority to a central agent (namely, the president), and by establishing an elaborate pre-negotiating advisory system with congressional vetos to constrain presidential action. The central hypothesis - - Congress imposes structure and process to ensure that policy decisions made by the executive are satisfactory to its members - - is based on the premise that members of Congress are motivated by an electoral incentive, that they adopt procedural arrangements to help win reelection, and that changes in procedural arrangements yield predictable changes in policy outcomes. The general conclusion is that while members of Congress have delegated authority to the president to enter into international trade agreements, they have simultaneously introduced procedural arrangements which constrain the substantive authority the president can exercise. This is independent of congressional approval and provisions for constituents injured by import competition opportunities for exemption, compensation, or delay. The importance of this analysis is that by identifying the process through which international trade policy is made, we are better able to specify the conditions that facilitate the maintenance of a relatively open trading system in the face of rising demands for import protection.
