Swing voting and fast-track authority.

• Author: DeVault, James M.

1. Introduction

   Following the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 and the Uruguay Round Agreement in 1994, the United States appeared to be on the verge of an era of unprecedented trade liberalization. Since that time, however, the United States has struggled to pass (or failed to pass) important trade liberalization legislation involving, for example, fast-track authority, normalized trade relations with China, and freer trade in Central America and the. Caribbean. More ominously, the current round of World Trade Organization negotiations has also stalled, partly as a result of American intransigence on issues such as cotton subsidies and other farm support programs.

   Why has it become so much more difficult to secure passage of legislation involving trade liberalization over the last 15 years? To identify the factors responsible for this shift I analyze three votes in the U.S. House of Representatives on bills that granted (or would have granted) the president fast-track authority. Attention is restricted to House votes on fast-track authority because trade liberalization has been much more contested in the House than in the U.S. Senate. The focus is limited to the three votes involving fast-track authority because the outcome of these votes parallels the larger shift in attitudes toward trade liberalization.

   Table 1 demonstrates this point. The table provides House vote counts for the three fast-track bills considered. The first fast-track bill came to a vote in 1993 and passed by a large margin, receiving affirmative votes from a majority of both Republicans and Democrats. The second fast-track bill came to a vote in 1998 and failed to pass by a sizable margin. Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the bill, which was also rejected by 71 Republicans. The last of the three fast-track bills came to a vote in 2001 and passed by a single vote. Again Democrats overwhelmingly opposed the bill, but Republican support for the bill was just great enough to secure its passage.

   In order to explain fast-track voting swings and the larger shift in attitudes toward trade liberalization, I focus on changes in four different factors: campaign contributions, constituency, ideology, and partisanship. Each of these factors has received attention in the literature on fast-track authority, and I now briefly consider each in turn. Devereaux, Lawrence, and Watkins (2006) and Chase and Kessler (2001) argue that Democratic support for trade liberalization in the House fell during the 1990s because the Democratic Party became increasingly dependent on campaign contributions from labor political action committees (PACs) during this period. After the loss of the Democratic majority in the House in 1994, business PACs redirected their contributions from House Democrats to House Republicans. This shift in support increased the Democratic Party's reliance on labor contributions, making it less likely that House Democrats would support trade liberalization.

   In contrast, both Conley (1999) and Bardwell (2000) argue that "constituency pressures" in the aftermath of NAFTA led House members to view trade liberalization more negatively. They argue that the job losses and other adverse economic effects of NAFTA caused House members, and particularly House Democrats, to reassess their view of trade liberalization. According to Devereaux, Lawrence, and Watkins (2006), many House Democrats also felt pressure to vote against fast-track authority in 1998 as a result of a well-coordinated grassroots campaign on the part of organized labor.

   In addition, ideological shifts, particularly in the Democratic Party, appear to have played an important role in shaping swing voting on fast-track authority. Conley (1999) notes that the loss of southern Democratic moderates in the House in 1994, coupled with the election of more liberal northern Democrats in subsequent years, made passage of fast-track authority in 1998 and 2001 much more difficult. Destler (2005) attributes this shift in part to what he calls activist "cause" groups, particularly those that represent labor rights and the environment. These groups pushed hard for the inclusion of labor and environmental standards in the 1998 and 2001 fast-track bills, and many House Democrats became increasingly sympathetic with this position.

   Destler (2005) also argues that partisanship played a significant role in the 1998 and 2001 House votes on fast-track authority. He notes that the change in the House majority in 1994 brought in new Republican leadership that focused more on results than bipartisanship. This trend was strengthened further after shifts in the House Republican leadership in 1998 and 2000. Magee (2010) argues that the shift in the party of the president in 2000 increased the likelihood that House Republicans would support fast-track authority in 2001. In part this was because Republican control of the presidency gave the Republican Party greater control over the content of any fast-track bill. The fact that the new president represented the majority party in the House also increased the leverage of the White House in drumming up support for fast-track authority.

   The goal of this article is to determine the importance of these different factors in explaining the shift in House sentiment toward trade liberalization over the last two decades. The article assesses the importance of these factors using roll call votes on three trade bills, all of which involved fast-track authority. Because the study examines the votes of legislators on the same issue over time, it is possible to identify the factors that caused legislators to shift their votes.

2. Background

   Fast-track authority was first granted to the president by the U.S. Congress in the Trade Act of 1974. Under fast-track authority, Congress has 60 days from the submission of a trade agreement to vote on the agreement as negotiated; amendments are not permitted. The goals of fast-track authority are twofold: first, to ensure timely Congressional action on any negotiated agreements, and second, to prevent Congress from unraveling trade agreements through amendments. Without fast-track authority, fewer countries would be willing to negotiate trade agreements with the United States because agreements negotiated by the president could subsequently be picked apart by Congress prior to congressional ratification. Because of this, labor interests, which generally oppose freer trade, have typically opposed fast-track authority as well, while business interests, which generally favor freer trade, have typically supported it.

   After fast-track authority was first granted to the president in 1974, Congress opted to renew it in 1979 and again in 1988. The three bills analyzed in this article address three House actions to renew fast-track authority since 1988. The first action occurred on June 22, 1993, when the House approved House Resolution (HR) 1876 by a vote of 295 to 126. HR 1876 extended fast-track authority until April 15, 1994, but only for the Uruguay round of the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT) negotiations. Without this extension, the U.S. negotiating position would have been jeopardized, threatening the entire GATT agreement. Recognizing this, Congress used the relatively narrow window provided by the extension to put pressure on its negotiating partners.

   Because HR 1876 extended fast-track authority only for the Uruguay round of GATT negotiations, President Bill Clinton sought a full extension of fast-track authority after these negotiations were successfully completed. His attempts to extend fast-track authority ended in failure on September 25, 1998, when the House defeated HR 2621 by a vote of 180 to 243. This vote marked the first time that any president had been denied fast-track authority. Opposition to the bill came primarily from Democrats, but the failure of the bill can also be attributed to the Republican House leadership, which deliberately brought the bill to a vote shortly before the 1998 congressional elections despite the reluctance of the president and House Democrats.

   When President George W. Bush entered office in 2001, new bilateral and multilateral trade agreements were a high priority, making the extension of fast-track authority a crucial part of his trade agenda. During the first session of the 107th Congress, the House leadership crafted a bill (HR 3005) intended to grant the president this authority. This bill was approved on December 11, 2001, by a vote of 215 to 214.

3. The Model

   The empirical model used in this article to analyze the three different fast-track votes is derived from theoretical work by Grossman and Helpman (1994). They developed a two-stage model of the political economy of trade policy: In the first stage, special interest groups submit campaign contribution schedules to legislators that specify what each group will contribute for each possible trade policy; in the second stage, legislators select the trade policy that maximizes their objective function. Each legislator is assumed to have an objective function that incorporates both campaign contributions and some measure of the net social cost of enacting the policies favored by special interests. At the margin, legislators balance the increase in their objective function produced by an additional dollar of campaign contributions against the reduction in this function resulting from the implementation of the policy that yields this dollar.

   The first stage of the Grossman and Helpman (1994) model focuses on the motive for PAC contributions, arguing that the purpose of these contributions is to influence legislator votes. According to this model, the legislators most susceptible to influence represent districts in which the social cost of deviating from their constituents' optimal trade policy is relatively small. Because the social cost of voting against their own constituents' interest is...