International Trade and Political Conflict: Commerce, Coalitions, and Mobility Paperback - 2002

"Where others have only speculated about the extent and effects of factor mobility on trade conflicts and policies, or have offered only specific and partial assessments, Michael Hiscox--in a series of pathbreaking articles, and now in this culminating book--covers almost the entire waterfront. First offering an overview of historical changes in factor mobility, and in conflicts over trade policy, in six major nations, he then presents a detailed and historically astute case study of each of the six. Finally, and trumping virtually all previous work by Americanists, Hiscox magisterially surveys the U.S. case from 1824 to the present: changes in U.S. factor mobility, in American trade-policy coalitions, and in Congressional roll-call votes. The result is both an impressive verification of the essential Stolper-Samuelson insight (that trade divisions follow class lines only when factors are mobile) and a neat illumination of formerly opaque mysteries about domestic political conflicts."--Ronald Rogowski, University of California, Los Angeles, author of Commerce and Coalitions: How Trade Affects Domestic Political Alignments

"Michael Hiscox's book proposes an extraordinarily intuitive yet powerful solution to the debate over what drives the politics of international trade--that whether class or industry rules trade politics depends on the cost of shifting uses (i.e. industries) for one's productive assets. I have absolutely no doubt that his solution will quickly become the textbook approach to the problem. But the contribution is much greater than that. Namely, Hiscox provides an enormously valuable and comprehensive multimethod test of the theory, using multiple countries and time periods, going far beyond all empirical work previously conducted on the subject."--Eric Reinhardt, Emory University