Most trade agreements are ratified with overwhelming support by legislators throughout the world. This lack of opposition is surprising given the strong distributional consequences of trade and the expectation of conventional political economy theory that parliamentary votes on trade policy should be closely contested between winners and losers of globalization. To analyze the driving forces behind legislators’ voting behavior while avoiding the obscuring effect of party discipline, I analyze under which circumstances legislators decide to rebel against their party’s position when voting on the ratification of trade agreements. I put forward two hypotheses: First, rebellions are more likely when the trade agreement is with a larger trading partner and when the liberalization through the agreement is more comprehensive. Second, legislators will rebel when their party’s position does not align with their constituency’s economic interests. These hypotheses are supported by a series of multinomial regression analyses based on an original dataset comprising votes of several thousand legislators from multiple countries on the ratification of trade agreements.

Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay today account for well over a third of world exports of cellulose, yet this industry only came into existence in the late twentieth century. The evolution of this industry across the three countries is the object of this study. This nascent industry required direct government support in all three countries to be successful. Forestry laws and government investments in research, education, and factory construction were all needed to encourage local and foreign capital. There were differences among these countries in their linkages to other economic sectors as well as their export mix. But in all three countries, the forestry industry was part of a general modernization of agriculture that allowed for successful competition in world markets.

How do the media describe the intersectional identities of elected politicians? Our study focuses on parliamentarians in the Netherlands who fall outside the prevailing norm in politics: women and female and male ethnic minorities. Drawing on 2,783 newspaper articles published between 1994 and 2012 and matched samples, we find that the media structurally emphasize the identities of all parliamentarians who are not white men. Women politicians are more often described in terms of gender, ethnic minorities in terms of ethnicity and Muslim politicians in terms of religion. Ethnic majority men, meanwhile, are most often described by their political ideology. We find that this works already for one minority identity, as well as multiple identities. By continuously highlighting the identities of politicians that diverge from the norm, the media, we argue, paint pictures of women and ethnic minority politicians as different and out of place.

According to partisan theory, variations in policy choices and outputs originate from the party composition of the government studied. In this study, we take a novel approach to address such assumptions by linking changes in municipal taxes with local government changes. We also add a baseline scenario in which we examine whether the composition of the local government affects tax levels. Drawing on a dataset that contains official Swedish statistics from 1994 to 2018, we find convincing support for the partisan effect. Tax levels are higher under left-wing rule, and more specifically, tax cuts particularly occur when left-wing governments are replaced by right-wing ones. These results do not vanish when controls are accounted for, while it can be particularly noticed that the condition of the municipal economy influences partisan ambitions. These findings thereby contradict prior theoretical assumptions that the local arena is free from ideological battles.

This essay reviews the following works:

Concrete Dreams: Practice, Value, and Built Environments in Post-crisis Buenos Aires. By Nicholas D’Avella. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Pp. 312. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781478005117.

Black Market Capital: Urban Politics and the Shadow Economy in Mexico City. By Andrew Konove. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. Pp ix + 304. $29.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780520293687.

Mapping the Megalopolis: Order and Disorder in Mexico City. Edited by Glen David Kuecker and Alejandro Puga. Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 2017. Pp vii + 304. $110.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781498559782.

Defiant Geographies: Race and Urban Space in 1920s Rio de Janeiro. By Lorraine Leu. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Pp. 238. $42.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9780822946007.

The Street Is Ours: Community, the Car, and the Nature of Public Space in Rio de Janeiro. By Shawn William Miller. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp viii + 349. $120.00 hardcover. ISBN: 9781108426978.

New World Cities: Challenges of Urbanization and Globalization in the Americas. Edited by John Tutino and Martin V. Melosi. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xii + 344. $34.95 paperback. ISBN: 9781469648750.

The Invention of the Favela. By Licia do Prado Valladares. Translated by Robert N. Anderson. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Pp. xxxii + 286 pages. $32.50 paperback. ISBN: 9781469649986.

A City on a Lake: Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City. By Matthew Vitz. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp ix + 352. $27.95 paperback. ISBN: 9780822370406.