Democrazia e commercio: il caso delle grandi potenze tra il 1980 e il 1998

In: Italian Political Science Review: Rivista italiana di scienza politica, Band 33, Heft 1, S. 31-69

Abstract

Starting from the origins of the Liberal tradition of political thought, this article traces the roots of the link between trade & democracy. They are to be found in the idea of "economic commerce" from the writings of Montesquieu & Olson's political economy work on the nexus between regime representativeness & fiscal policy choices to the most recent empirical literature on the "democratic difference." The assumption that, for causes of both fiscal optimization & policy constraints exerted by a protectionist legislative branch on the executive, democracies are more prone to engage in free trade than nondemocracies. This study proves that domestic political regimes have an impact on the level of bilateral trade among great powers, while also endowing with robust empirical evidence the proposition according to which pairs of democratic states tend to trade more with each other than do mixed pairs (eg, pairs composed of a democracy & an autocracy). Further, this research stands as the first empirical test of the relevance of the difference for trade made by democracy after the end of the Cold War & the democratization of Russia. 2 Tables, 1 Appendix, 48 References. Adapted from the source document.