How do political relations affect international trade?

Theoretical and empirical research in the 1990s and early 2000s provided a strong and intuitive justification for understanding political preferences over trade policy as dependent on the income earned by individuals resulting from changes in tariffs. Yet, recent experience has revealed this approach to lack a critical component: sociocultural identity as a preference determinant. While leading figures in the earlier literature have responded to this deficiency with an improved model, that model yields predictions whose clarity pales when compared to those from older models. Learning to use and improve on this model will thus be a challenge faced by policymakers in the current era.