Globalization as ideology: China’s effects on organizational advocacy and relations among US trade policy stakeholder groups

Abstract

While literature on US voter trade policy preferences has an established diversity of theories and methods, academic and popular approaches to US organizational trade policy advocacy are underdeveloped. The dominant methodologies in economics conceptualize stakeholder group policy preferences as a continuum from free trade to protectionism. In contrast, this study builds on literature that assumes that organizations have both economic and ideological motivations. I examine China’s effects on US stakeholder group advocacy and intergroup relations (e.g. multinational business associations, domestic manufacturing groups, and labor unions). I use interviews with organizational leaders and content analysis of documents from US stakeholders in manufacturing and services sectors. I argue that US-China issues reshaped organizational advocacy by expanding and evolving ideological interests. As groups increasingly advocate on the basis of their ideological interests, their discrete economic interests are a shrinking share of the content of trade politics, including traditional protectionism. Rather than simply advocating their microeconomic interests, US stakeholder groups organize around their competing ideologies for the future of US-China integration—free trade, strategic trade, and fair trade. China issues led new organizational agreements and disagreements along those ideological lines, which preceded policy outcomes reflective of the convergences and divergences of their goals.