Internal and external sources of American foreign economic policymaking: The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)

Much of the International Political Economy (IPE) literature on American foreign economic policymaking stresses either societal, state, or international systemic factors as the source of trade policy. The complex reality is that the causal weight of these potential determinants of policy varies over time and from issue to issue. Recent literature seems to stress this more eclectic explanation and focuses on the interactions between these potential variables. In this vein, the dissertation will assess the relative importance of these contending explanations as well as explore how these variables interacted in the formation of the U.S. negotiating position in the automotive and textile sectors in the recent NAFTA negotiations. The dissertation will compare the efficacy of these approaches in explaining NAFTA to that of the two-level game, or the "integrative" approach developed by Robert Putnam. By using the integrative approach to explore the interactions between the above variables, the dissertation attempts to better understand NAFTA as well as augment the IPE "sources of foreign economic policy" literature. Additionally, the dissertation will probe the efficacy of the integrative approach itself and offer a number of refinements to it. Are the propositions suggested by this approach at the theoretical level found in the case studies at hand? What are the conditions in which many of the actors' negotiation strategies will be employed and employed successfully in the negotiations? The dissertation finds that the integrative approach is quite useful in explaining the negotiations. Moreover, a number of refinements about the integrative approach's primary propositions will be suggested.