Who Supports Global Economic Engagement? The Sources of Preferences in American Foreign Economic Policy

Can IR theory help us understand who supports global engagement through foreign aid and trade? Using votes in the US House of Representatives from 1979-2004, we explore different theoretical predictions about foreign economic policy. Unlike other studies, we assess the impact of a wide variety of factors: political economy, foreign policy pressures, and ideology. We find three surprising results. Aid preferences are as affected by the same domestic political economy factors as trade ones. Trade preferences, but not economic aid ones, are shaped by the president’s foreign policy concerns; for economic aid, domestic political economy factors matter more than foreign policy ones. Aid is shaped more by ideological factors than is trade, but ideology plays a different substantive role in each, with groups holding more left-wing ideas favoring aid and opposing trade, and vice versa for conservative ones. No single axis of conflict over internationalism exists in the US. Foreign policy substitutability between aid and trade is constrained by these different domestic political coalitions, and presidents and their foreign policy concerns matter more in trade than previously known.