The internationalization of markets has commonly been associated with wide-ranging changes in domestic politics in the past two decades, but the precise nature of these linkages has remained opaque. Recently, however, numerous scholars have developed rigorous “open polity” analyses of the impact of international change on politics and policies within nations. At the highest level of aggregation, Ronald Rogowski's Commerce and Coalitions focuses on coalitional politics in countries with different endowments of land, labor and capital (Rogowski 1989). Jeffry Frieden's Debt, Development and Democracy investigates the reaction of different economic sectors to changes in international market conditions (Frieden 1991a). In Resisting Protectionism, Helen Milner discusses the political consequences of the changing competitive positions of individual firms (Milner 1988). Frieden and Rogowski's contribution to this volume synthesizes the underlying logic of such arguments by linking the interaction between changes in relative prices in the international economy and the specificity of domestic actors' assets, on the one hand, with changes in these actors' domestic policy preferences and the political coalitions they form to advance those preferences, on the other hand.

This line of research provides a parsimonious approach to analyzing the impact of integration into the international economy on the preferences and coalitional behavior of domestic actors. It should be noted, however, that scholarship in this vein pays relatively little attention to the relationship between preference change and policy outcomes, much less to the mechanisms by which they might be related.