The President, Congress, and Trade Policy

Three pervasive characteristics shape the way in which the President and Congress shape trade policy–divided institutions, democratic participation, and deliberative processes. At the same time there are persistent tensions between competing objectives –macroeconomic and microeconomic management imperatives, national security and economic policy considerations, and the use of trade as a foreign policy tool. These characteristics and tensions are imbedded in institutional biases in the executive and legislative branches that influence the ebb and flow of power on trade policy issues. The President and the Congress have succeeded in producing a flexible framework that has contributed to two major strengths of U.S. trade policy development. First, it is a system that fully exposes the broad array of considerations that policy makers should take into account. Second, it is a system that provides ample scope for policy entrepreneurs and that has produced a large number of initiatives. What it has not produced are consistently coherent policies. Initiatives are begun, only to be reversed when competing pressures build up elsewhere. Producing coherent and sustained policies while retaining the initiative, representativeness and sensitivity to political realities that the U.S. system now provides remains the great challenge for U.S. policy-makers

Commercial policy · Democracy · Economics · Foreign policy · International trade · Legislature · Political science · Politics · Representativeness heuristic · Scope (computer science · Law · Public Administration · World Trade Organization Law

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