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In this paper I build on Krugman's work on the "obsession" with competitiveness, accepting as inescapable fact what Krugman laments: the emergence of the global economy and competitiveness as focal points for policy debate is a political phenomenon understandable in terms of agenda setting and issue framing. I explore trade politics in the United States in the 1980s and 1990s in light of two related propositions. First, globalization's domestic effects and the policy requirements imposed by the world economy are at once real and negotiated in the political process—the global economy is 'socially constructed' for domestic political/purposes. Second, the ways that the world economy has been constructed can be well understood by using the issue framing and 'garbage can' literatures from policy studies. Understandings of the domestic policy requirements of the world economy are at once manufactured in the political process as interests seek to connect old solutions to promising new problems and shape that process as those understandings come to mark the limits of political economic possibility.

THE AUTHORS EXPLORE THE LINKAGE BETWEEN PARTISAN REALIGNMENTS AND THE CAREER PATTERNS OF POLITICIANS. THEY HYPOTHESIZE THAT WHEN A REALIGNMENT OCCURS QUICKLY, THE EMERGING MAJORITY PARTY WILL RELY HEAVILY ON INEXPERIENCED "POLITICAL AMATEURS" BECAUSE IT LACKS A POOL OF PROFESSIONALS. WHEN THE CHANGE IN THE PARTIES IS MORE GRADUAL, THE EMERGING PARTY WILL HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DEVELOP ITS OWN PROFESSIONALS AND WILL ALSO ATTRACT EXPERIENCED POLITICIANS FROM THE OTHER PARTY. THE AUTHORS FIND SUPPORT FOR THEIR HYPOTHESES IN DATA GATHERED FROM THE CAREER PATTERNS OF MEMBERS OF THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN THE 1850'S AND 1930'S AND IN THE REPUBLICAN PARTY OF THE MODERN SOUTH.