ABSTRACT
The major political parties in the United States, Canada, and Mexico have profoundly altered their historical positions on foreign trade. This chapter explains the long-term relationship in North America between trade and political party. Traditional theory in international political economy explains a nation's propensity for free trade or protectionism as the effect of hegemonic dominance or domestic interest groups. A theory of party and trade ought to be able to rank them as to importance and to show why one explanation for trade orientation is more important than the others for a particular polity in a particular interval of history. Ideally, they will account for the party flip-flops observed historically regarding trade liberalization in North America. Trade liberalization threatens jobs in the very manufacturing industries in which organized labor is strongest, namely the more labor-intensive industries. The model of trade-party linkage proposed shows how multifaceted and subject to slippage trade policy can become.
