The Executive's Local Constituencies

Granting the executive power over trade agreements is supposed to solve this dynamic by removing ties to specific districts. As Oatley explains:

The president represents a national constituency rather than a single district. Because individual legislators represent a single district, they can gain the benefit of protection for producers based in their districts and impose the costs of protection on people and businesses living outside their district. The president, whose constituency extends into every district, has nowhere to push the costs of protection. Instead, the president must weigh the benefits gained by one district from a higher tariff against the costs that such tariffs will impose on other districts.(3)

The logic seems simple enough, but makes an underlying assumption that reveals why exceptions exist: the argument assumes that all votes are equal to the president and are weighed against one another. However, because the Electoral College exists, votes between states are not weighed against one another. Instead, only votes within a state are competitive. This creates an interesting dynamic for a president whose primary goal is to be reelected for a second term. If a protectionist policy would help a president gain votes in a state critical to his re-election by helping that state's key industries (while only hurting industries in states he could not reasonably win anyways) it is to that president's political advantage to pursue protectionism.

Similarly, a president seeking to promote policies in the legislative branch will be inclined to grant trade concessions to legislators in order to preserve their seat in the next election or to gain their cooperation on future legislation.(4) Both of these mechanisms severely cut against the premise of the argument articulated by Oatley because they illustrate situations where the president will still have political ties to geographic areas and specific industries. The theory's failures to explain repeated attempts by the executive branch to enact protectionist policies even while not being explicitly tied to a legislative district are explained easily by examining the structures inherent in the American political process as well as secondary processes in the American government. Thus, these factors expose the flaws in the premises upon which the classical theory behind the RTAA is based.

The most recent example of a president blatantly pursuing protectionist policy for domestic political gain is President Bush's decision to raise tariffs on steel in March of 2002. In this case, two critical political issues were weighing heavily on the president: his own re-election campaign and a tight race for the majority in the Senate. In reality, these two issues were very tightly linked as they represented an opportunity for Bush to keep a campaign promise he had made in the 2000 election season to aid the American steel industry while helping Republican Senators up for re-election. The New York Times explained the political motivation for raising tariffs on steel as "a way for him to argue that he is making good on his campaign promises to ailing steel makers and steelworkers, particularly in states like West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio that are vital to the Republicans in this year's Congressional election."(5) To make the point more obvious to the Bush administration, advocates of the steel lobby made sure he knew their support was critical to his election in the tight 2000 race. In particular, lobbyists from companies in West Virginia noted "that Bush's slim margin of victory in the presidential race likely would have been a slim margin of defeat without the votes he won in steel-producing West Virginia, these advocates pressed hard for 40 percent tariffs on steel imports."(6) In this way, lobbyists reminded Bush that his political future lay not with states like New York and Vermont, which he was sure to lose in the next presidential election, but in swing states that would make or break another close election. Making his intentions of using the tariffs as a political ploy even more transparent, Bush scheduled the tariffs to expire in 2005: shortly after he would be sworn into office a second time.(7)

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