Suchergebnisse

The European Union (EU) has increasingly called for regulatory agreements in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in areas such as investment, competition, environment, & labour. Why has the EU attempted to satisfy such new demands by pursuing regulatory goals within the WTO rather than within other international organizations? I suggest two reasons for the EU's choice of the WTO. First, the nature of issue linkage in international trade negotiations has changed from exclusive exchanges of market access to the exchange of market access for regulation. Owing to the diversity of domestic constituency demands & consensus decision-making, the EU is particularly reliant on such broad issue linkages. & second, judicialization & the possibility of cross-retaliation in the WTO have enhanced the credibility of WTO commitments, increasing the organization's attractiveness for issue linkages across policy fields. I show how these two factors have contributed to the EU's attempt to place regulatory issues on the agenda of the Doha Development Round. References. Adapted from the source document.

Defence date: 27 May 2002 ; Examining Board: Daniel Verdier (Supervisor; European University Institute, San Domenico di Fiesole) Adrienne Héritier (Co-supervisor; Max-Planck Gesellschaft, Bonn) Petros Mavroidis (Université de Neuchâtel) Patrick Messerlin (Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris) ; First made available online in June 2012. ; In this PhD dissertation I explain how different forms of international trade institutions affect domestic coalition patterns. Negotiated trade policy instruments create incentives for sector-wide interest representation, while administrative instruments elicit interest aggregation on a more product-specific, intra-sectoral level. I provide a rationale why reciprocal trade negotiations foster sector-wide associations, whereas trade rule enforcement elicits intra-sectoral coalitions. In contrast to existing explanations, these propositions can account for coalition patterns during both the GATT 1947, which consisted of a series of trade negotiation rounds, and the WTO (1995-), which combines negotiations with binding administrative enforcement in the form of international dispute settlement. Comprehensive evidence from EU trade policy lobbying confirms the explanatory force of the hypotheses. Sectoral peak associations co-ordinate interest representation during the GATT and WTO Rounds, whereas private interests predominantly organise on an intra-sectoral level when filing petitions for enforcement instruments administered by the European Commission. Exhaustive databases provide evidence about the predominantly intra-sectoral trade associations that lodge complaints with administrative instruments such as Anti-Dumping, market access investigations and WTO dispute settlement, while other sources reveal how sector-wide peak associations organise during negotiation Rounds. I provide supportive evidence from existing research on interest representation in American trade policy, and control for other factors such as industry concentration and non-trade regulation. The shift from negotiations-only to enforcement is further significant for interest representation in four selected sectors of European industry: chemicals, pharmaceuticals, steel and textiles. Although each of these industries has a long history of sector coherence, they all reorganised their membership and representation structure to accommodate for the increased importance of enforcement instruments. The adoption of direct company membership and/or the inclusion of product-specific trade associations accompany the decrease in importance of the sectorwide peak association in a world where the provision of detailed information for judicial enforcement is starting to weigh more than the political clout of sector-wide peak associations during negotiations.

A review essay covering books by: 1) A. Dur and M. Elsig, The European Union's Foreign Economic Policies: A Principal-Agent Perspective (2011); 2) A. Dur, Protection for Exporters: Power and Discrimination in Transatlantic Trade Relations, 1930-2010 (2010); 3) E. da Conceicao-Heldt, Negotiating Trade Liberalization at the WTO: Domestic Politics and Bargaining Dynamics (2011).

Why did the European Union (EU) attempt yet fail to reform its anti-dumping legislation between 2006 and 2008? We analyse this attempt to reform a legislative act regulating interest groups' access to public decision-makers by relying on collective action and principal-agent theory. Contrary to approaches assuming that the European Commission enjoys a large degree of agent autonomy to implement a more liberal EU trade policy than most member state principals would want, we conceive of principals and their agents as actors responding to the relative balance between interest groups mobilizing for and against reform. Tracing interest group collective action advantages back to industry consolidation and the certainty of future losses, we argue that concentrated producer groups mobilize most intensively and persistently and successfully influence policy outcomes. On the losing side, importers and retailers, joined by producers having outsourced parts of their production, let alone consumers, fail to counter this mobilization effort. Adapted from the source document.

In this article we show why a major initiative announced by the European Commission in 2006 to reform the EU anti-dumping policy after two years of very intense political activity became bogged down in a fully preserving the legislative status quo. Adapted from the source document.

Opens a special journal issue devoted to the issue of interest group power & influence. Contributors understand power as "control over outcomes." Here, attention is given to rival hypotheses related to institutions, interest group characteristics, & issues as factors impacting the influence of interest groups on political outcomes. Obstacles to testing these competing hypotheses empirically are outlined. Essays are introduced. References. D. Edelman

The actions of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) concerned with such issues as development, human rights, and the protection of the environment voicing concerns to public authorities raises the questions: Do these newly mobilised societal actors influence EU trade policy outcomes? We answer in the negative, arguing that such groups, which have diffuse costs and benefits from trade policies, do not dispose of resources with which they can threaten or enhance political actors' chances of re-election or re-appointment. A survey of NGOs and business groups as well as two in-depth case studies on the negotiations concerning the EU's Economic Partnership Agreements and the EU's policy on access to medicines in developing countries support our reasoning. The analysis shows that although NGOs have gained access to policy-makers, they have largely failed to shift policy outcomes in their favour. Adapted from the source document.

Trade policy in the EU and the United States is to a large extent delegated to executive agents. Existing explanations claim that legislators delegate because they wish to liberalize but are unable to achieve this on their own. The authors show that legislators delegate powers to obtain foreign market access for exporters and protection for import-competing interests. Confronted with heterogeneous demands from both groups, principals delegate to two sets of agents to confer concentrated benefits on these constituencies, and install control to avoid concentrated losses, while maintaining the flow of resources from lobbying. The authors derive the empirically observable implication that with the increase in the share of tradables in the overall economy, delegation as well as control should steadily increase with time. They then test the validity of this proposition for U.S. trade policy since 1916 and for European trade policy since 1958. Tables, Appendixes, References. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright 2005.]

The regulation of intellectual property rights takes place in a range of international venues. This proliferation of international venues greatly enhances the potential for venue shopping. We argue that different levels of domestic regulation and differing degrees of judicialization account for actors' preferences over institutional venues. We take into consideration two scenarios. Conceiving of judicialization as the delegation of adjudication to an independent third party and the enforcement through multilaterally authorized sanctions, we show that: (i) upward regulatory harmonization leads actors preferring weak regulatory intellectual property rights standards to strive for venues with low degrees of judicialization, whereas those favoring stringent intellectual property rights protection prefer highly judicialized venues; and (ii) downward harmonization leads to the opposite constellation of institutional preferences. We show how these expectations hold by way of in-depth case studies of two instances of global intellectual property rights regulation: the regulation of plant genetic resources and intellectual property rights for medicines. Adapted from the source document.

Published online in February 2016 ; What affects lobbying patterns in trade policymaking? Existing explanations focus mainly on economic determinants, like the rise of intra-industry trade. We argue that the international trade institutions of the World Wade Organization (WTO) themselves are also key for understanding which type of interest mobilization is likely to arise. We contend that the institutional setting of issue-linkage based trade negotiations creates incentives for firms to work through broad sector-wide lobbying organizations, while judicial adjudication and enforcement in WTO dispute settlement stimulates de-linkage, leading to product-specffic interest mobilization. We illustrate how these two arguments can explain the coexistence of both sector-wide and product-specific lobbying in the contemporary international trade regime. We provide evidence on interest mobilization for United States (US) and European Union (EU) initiated WTO disputes, and on EU and US domestic interest organizations that mobilize during multilateral trade rounds or are present at WTO ministerial conferences.

Contemporary studies on interest group politics have mainly used single interest organizations as their central objects of study. This has led to a rich body of knowledge on the motivations of interest group mobilization, strategy development and even policy access and influence. The focus on single interest groups, however, has resulted in limited knowledge on aggregate patterns of interest groups' activity. This article seeks to address this lacuna, by examining patterns of mobilization and conflict of interest groups' activity in EU legislative policymaking. To do so, it adopts a unique policy-centred research design and an empirical assessment of policy mobilization for a sample of 125 EU legislative proposals based on extensive media coding as well as structured elite interviews. We find that levels of policy mobilization vary substantively across different legislative proposals and that political conflict between interest groups is remarkably low. This suggests that interest group conflict and mobilization contribute little to EU politicization and that in cases where interest groups voice opposing positions, conflicts do not occur between business and non-business groups. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of interest groups in EU legislative policymaking.