Research
Working Papers
Courting the Median: Strategic President and the Distribution of Temporary Protection in U.S. Free Trade Agreements
*Previous versions presented at IHS Trade Symposium (Harvard University, July 2024); GSIPE APSA 2024 Pre-Conference and APSA 2024 (Philadelphia, September 2024); GSIPE Fall 2024 Virtual Webinar (October 2024), PEIO (Harvard University, January 2025), and ISA (Chicago, March 2025).
*Current version presented at UCSD IR Retreat (May 2025) and IHS Trade and Industrial Policy Workshop (May 2025).
Abstract: How do US presidents liberalize trade in the shadow of congressional politics? Conventional wisdom suggests that a strategic president would maintain the pro-trade coalition in Congress by limiting tariff cuts on important goods. What happens when all dutiable import tariffs must be cut per WTO rules on preferential trade agreements? I argue that the president should strategically phase out specific tariffs in free trade agreements, as opposed to eliminating tariffs immediately, to buy Congressional support. Specifically, I argue that the executive targets phaseout to the median legislator as they are cost-efficient and credible in ratification promises. Controlling for districts’ economic needs, I find that a greater share of a district’s workforce is covered by tariff phaseout the closer the representative is to the median on trade issues. However, more tariff phaseouts do not necessarily translate to a higher likelihood for ratification, suggesting that it is one empirically testable part of a bundle of demands fulfilled to buy median legislators’ ratification votes.
Keywords: preferential trade agreements, tariffs, congress, ratification, median legislator