Agents or Advisers? Bureaucratic Structure and the Politics of Protection

• In Event: US Bureaucratic and Legislative Politics in International Organizations

Abstract

Studies of trade policy have largely neglected the role of bureaucracy, despite its central role in shaping how competing preferences are aggregated into policy. This paper argues interest group input can empower bureaucrats with more information, but leads to narrowly targeted interests increasingly gaining control over policy. This effect is mitigated by bureaucratic structures endowed with more independence and internal expertise, and less reliant on formalized channels of industry participation. I provide evidence for the mechanisms of access for industries into the bureaucracy in an in-depth micro-level case study of regulation in the United States. I zoom in on a single country—the U.S.—to explore the mechanisms, as a country where stakeholders frequently interact with bureaucrats to create foreign economic policy. I then test to what extent such lobbying is consequential for a panel of 135 countries and 20 years, taking advantage of WTO reports to construct a dataset that identifies their bureaucratic trade structure. I find that bureaucracies with apolitical expertise implement policies that are less protectionist than those that engage active industry participation, controlling for macroeconomic shocks and confounders for institutional design.

Author

• Diana Stanescu, Princeton University