Pirates, politics, and trade policy: Structuring the negotiations and enforcing the outcomes of the Sino-United States intellectual property dialogue, 1991--1999 (China)

This thesis extends Robert Putnam's two-level games framework analyzing the intersection of domestic and international politics in the development and execution of international trade policy. Instead of focusing on the negotiations themselves, I examine what structures the two sides' bargaining positions and what drives subsequent patterns of implementation. My case is the US-China negotiations over intellectual property rights (IPR).; Using mostly implicit threats, local Chinese officials deterred US companies operating in China from leveling grievances during the Special 301 trade policy making process, a dynamic labeled here as “transnational deterrence.” Differences in this threat's effectiveness were largely due to variation across the organizational structures, proliferation of goals, and organizational “missions” of the IPR-based trade lobbies representing these US companies. These characteristics diminished the salience of the threat for the US copyright lobby, while magnifying it for its trademark-based counterpart. This deterred the trademark lobby from effectively harnessing the agenda setting and ratification process under Special 301, reducing the scope of US demands and corresponding Chinese concessions. This finding is significant for two reasons. First, it identifies a conflictual relationship between two sets of subnational actors that influences the outcome of trade negotiations, a dimension largely unexplored by the existing two-level games literature. Second, it demonstrates that China was able to benefit at the negotiating table, largely through the consequences of transnational deterrence.; The second principal finding of this thesis has to do with another theme of two-level games, defection from international agreements. I argue that the specific characteristics of the bureaucracies charged with implementing these agreements can be a major factor in explaining compliance patterns. Variation along the three dimensions of organizational reach, administrative tasking, and bureaucratic “mind-set” explains these patterns of “bureaucratic defection.”...