Whereas historical accounts of U.S. tariff policy from 1877 to 1934 emphasize the pivotal role of parties, previous quantitative studies have failed to identify significant partisan effects. A formal model of policymaking in which strong parties aggregate voters' preferences provides empirical...

If different parties control the U.S. Congress and White House, the United States may maintain higher import protection than otherwise. This proposition follows from a distributive politics model in which Congress can choose to delegate trade policymaking to the President. When the congressional...