The most intractable and protracted transatlantic trade conflict of the last decade was over bananas, which grow neither on the European nor on the North American continent. Our explanation of the conflict emphasizes the determining role of the domestic politics of the EU and the United States. It was driven not only by the extreme divergence of preferences of Brussels' and Washington's domestic constituencies, rooted in the competitive position of competing banana industries, but also, and critically, by the institutional configuration of (agricultural) trade policymaking on either side of the Atlantic. The EU agricultural trade policy process is characterized by a division of labor that favors agricultural over wider trading interests, sectoral segmentation, and sector-specific issue-linkage. The U.S. trade policy process is characterized by the Congress's growing reassertion of its trade policy prerogatives, the growing institutionalization of firms' access to the trade policy bureaucracy, and the growing volume and role of corporate campaign donations. The combined effect of these different policy process traits has been to facilitate the capture of banana trade policy by highly organized, particularistic, and predominantly trading interests. Although neither the WTO nor the transatlantic trading relationship ultimately “slipped” over bananas, the conflict provides scant reason for optimism concerning the future of this relationship or indeed of the multilateral international trading system, at least in as far as the latter depends on good EU-U.S. relations.

The vast majority of papers written about interest groups' political influence focuses on the role of money in politics. Business and interest groups' participation in campaign finance, in the form of hard and soft money, has been the subject of hundreds of theoretical and empirical studies. Moreover, with the recent congressional moves to reform campaign finance laws, campaign finance studies have received a prominent position in public discourse.

eBay provides an online auction venue for remote and anonymous members of its online community to realize gains from trade. As a venue it never sees the items sold, verifies the item listings, handles settlements, or represents the buyer or seller. Despite the associated market imperfections and incentive problems, over five million auctions are active on an average day. Trading is based on trust among members of the eBay community, and trust is supported by a multilateral reputation mechanism based on member feedback. eBay supplements the reputation mechanism with rules and policies that mitigate incentive problems, reduce transactions costs, and support trust among members and between members and the company. Reputations and the rules and policies provide a private ordering of eBay's community. This paper examines this private ordering in the context of the company's strategy and in the shadow of the public order.

This article examines the roles of multinational corporations and the European Union (EU) in structuring global competition around wireless standardization. It analyzes the realities of global competition in information and communications technology (ICT) markets from a more liberal-strategic viewpoint than the subsidy-based industry support promulgated by strategic trade theorists in the 1980s and 1990s. According to a liberal-strategic trade perspective, public actors try to tweak the rules of the world economy to structure global competition in ways that enhance job creation, overall competitiveness in high-technology sectors, and domestic welfare, rather than being primarily concerned about import competition. The story of the European approach to global standardization and competition—and the strategic use of international standards bodies by multinational corporations—primarily represents an aggressive outward-oriented strategy. European actors pursued a globally oriented strategy in the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) with the objective of aligning Europe with market and policy developments in the rapidly growing markets of the Asia—Pacific region. By downplaying the importance of import competition, often stressed by strategic trade theorists a liberal-strategic approach to the ICT industry focuses on the prospect of cutting-edge innovations based on a coherent industry strategy that looks at the creation of internationally competitive technologies in the longer-term rather than at incremental change and current import competition pressure.

MNCs are increasingly facing global environmental issues demanding coordinated market and non-market strategic responses. The home country institutional context and individual company histories can create divergent pressures on strategy for MNCs based in different countries; however, the location of MNCs in global industries and their participation in ‘global issues arenas’ create issue-level fields within which strategic convergence might also be expected. This paper analyzes the responses of oil MNCs to climate change and finds that local context influenced initial corporate reactions, but that convergent pressures predominate as the issue matures.

This paper uses newly available data from the 1995 Lobby Disclosure Act to assess the argument that PAC contributions are used to gain access to legislators. First, we find a much stronger connection between lobbying and campaign contributions than previous statistical research has revealed—groups that have both a lobbyist and a PAC account for 70 percent of all interest group expenditures and 86 percent of all PAC contributions. Second, we find that groups that engage in relatively large amounts of lobbying-and therefore presumably have a high demand for access—allocate their campaign contributions differently than groups that do not. Groups that emphasize lobbying pay more attention to members' positions of power inside Congress, and less attention to members' electoral circumstances, than other groups. Groups that emphasize lobbying also appear to be more bipartisan and less ideological than other groups, giving more equally to both parties and more broadly across the ideological spectrum.

When I was a boy, my family would occasionally receive tall baskets filled with fruits, nuts and jams, most often around the holidays. These gifts from business acquaintances of my father were not meant to be inducements for him to break the law; rather, they were little niceties intended to maintain ongoing relationships. Today, when my wife and I are invited to dinner, we usually bring flowers or a bottle of wine as a gift. This is not some crass attempt on our part to ensure that sanitary conditions are maintained during meal preparation; it is only a symbol of our appreciation for the kindness of our hosts. Not for a moment do I believe that we would be ostracized should we go to dinner engagements empty-handed, nor would my father have punished nongivers. As such, these gift exchanges can be seen as epiphenomena: they symbolize underlying relationships, but they do not constitute relationships.

Administrative agencies in the United States have developed highly formalized and complex processes for public participation in rulemaking, especially in areas of social regulation such as the environment and workplace safety and health. This case study considers the significance of participation in formal rulemaking processes by connecting the quality of participation to the strategic possibilities in litigation between private interests and regulatory agencies. Specifically, the strategic possibilities of the leading interest groups engaged in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's major “Lockout/Tagout” rulemaking illustrate how legal resources are created through the development of evidence and claims in hearings. Written and oral presentations, apparently aimed directly at persuading the agency, indirectly affect agency deliberations by increasing the possibility that courts will constrain agency decisionmaking, thus creating opportunities for negotiated alternatives. The case ultimately serves as a paradigmatic example of how bargaining arises at the micro level of policy systems that are infused with broader legal structures.

This article tests two hypotheses about post-communist business associations. The first predicts weak business associations which are presented with insurmountable collective action problems by the flattened civil society inherited from totalitarianism. According to this hypothesis, no business associations are inherited from the previous regime, and associations are confronted with difficult-to-organize latent groups of large numbers of new small enterprises. The second hypothesis, as proposed by Mancur Olson, predicts strong business associations benefiting from the collective action advantages of the communist economic structure which was composed of small numbers of large enterprises. The hypotheses are tested with case studies of Poland's five most influential business associations. The conclusion is that the flattened civil society hypothesis is best borne out by the evidence. This suggests that, in other countries, political factors, rather than the standard communist economic structure, are more likely to explain the persistence of industrial super lobbies.

One of the central concerns about American policy making institutions is the degree to which political outcomes can be influenced by interested parties. While the literature on interest group strategies in particular institutions—legislative, administrative, and legal—is extensive, there is very little scholarship which examines how the interdependencies between institutions affects the strategies of groups. In this paper we examine in a formal theoretical model how the opportunity to litigate administrative rulemaking in the courts affects the lobbying strategies of competing interest groups at the rulemaking stage. Using a resource-based view of group activity, we develop a number of important insights about each stage that cannot be observed by examining each one in isolation. We demonstrate that lobbying effort responds to the ideology of the court, and the responsiveness of the court to resources. In particular, (1) as courts become more biased toward the status quo, interest group lobbying investments become smaller, and may be eliminated all together, (2) as interest groups become wealthier, they spend more on lobbying, and (3) as the responsiveness of courts to resources decreases, the effect it has on lobbying investments depends on the underlying ideology of the court.

The extent of business support for democracy in Latin America may determine whether the transitions from authoritarian rule since the 1980s lead to the consolidation of democratic regimes. While some analysts see business support for democracy as firm, others regard its as precarious, and still others believe it is contingent upon whether elected governments contest the economic interests or political dominance of the bourgeoisie. The difficulty of generalizing about the political orientations of business underscores the need for well-documented case studies. This study focuses on Peru, a country where democracy has been at grave risk, and it offers insight into the underlying forces and conditions that determine whether business supports or undermines democratic governance.

Analyses of corporate governance problems in China's state sector have mainly focused on administrative interference from state agencies. So far the influence of Communist party institutions has received little attention. Although the influence of ideology has diminished greatly, the Chinese Communist party continues to monitor and control economic actors at every level of the state sector. This article shows that the institutional structure through which the party executes its monitoring and control functions has a corrosive effect on the day-to-day governance of the vast majority of state enterprises. The party's management structure aggravates the inadequate monitoring of managerial performance, weakens managerial incentives, and amplifies insufficient corporate transparency, thereby allowing state asset managers to carve out informal spheres of autonomy. These spheres of autonomy create opportunities for insider control, economic corruption, and the illicit privatization of state assets. Effective and sustainable privatization and corporate governance reforms in China's state sector will thus require the party to substantially diminish its authority over state sector executives.

In “The Allocation of Resources by Interest Groups: Lobbying, Litigation and Administrative Regulation,” (hereafter referred to as LLAR), John and Rui de Figueiredo make an important contribution to our understanding of how interest groups choose between lobbying and litigation strategies in the regulation game. Their work demonstrates the value of formally modeling the regulation game by distinguishing between lobbying and litigation. Drawing upon my own related work, in this brief comment I will focus upon some of the implications of formal models of lobbying and litigation for our understanding of how regulatory incentives are affected by judicial review and alternative statutory regimes. I hope to atleast suggest that in addition to illuminating many crucial issues in political science—such as the theory of lobbying and theories of political disadvantage—the sort of approach taken by the de Figueiredos has great significance for the analysis of some fundamental issues in administrative law and public law more generally.

This paper analyzes how the structure of the legislature affects interest groups' incentives to lobby. Lobbying is modelled as the strategic provision of information by an interest group to a multi-member legislature, and the effectiveness of lobbying lies in the ability of information to change the winning policy coalitions. We show that with a long enough time horizon for policymakers, the distinguishing feature between the U.S. Congress and European parliamentary systems—the vote of confidence procedure—reduces an agenda setter's willingness to change policy coalitions, and thus significantly lowers the incentives for interest group lobbying.

The Center for Responsive Politics reports that U.S. lobbying expenditures substantially exceed interest group campaign contributions, without including the lobbying that is not required to be reported to the government. Although it has grown in Europe, particularly with respect to the European Union, lobbying is less important than in the United States. Bennedsen and Feldmann (BF) provide an important and insightful explanation for the difference in terms of the institutional structure of governments. They present a model of informational lobbying in client politics where an interest group provides information to a majority-rule (three-member) legislature. The legislature chooses the scale of a program whose benefits can be distributed among legislative districts. The legislative agenda setter has a vote buying problem and allocates benefits to one other legislator to obtain her vote. BF compare legislatures operating with and without a confidence procedure that allows the agenda setter to tie passage of its proposal the continuation of the government. This commentary considers the method for comparing these two institutions, assesses the implications of the theory, and considers future research related to the theory.