Recent research in international political economy has begun to explore the implications of producer heterogeneity for trade politics. Variations in productivity and size lead to systematic variations in market behaviors, especially with respect to firms’ abilities to engage foreign markets. This heterogeneity similarly leads to systematic variations in policy stances: Highly productive firms are more likely to favor trade liberalization than their less productive counterparts. I test the role of firm heterogeneity on trade-policy stances using original and representative survey data of Japanese manufacturers. I find that highly productive firms are more likely to favor liberalization than others, while a large portion of producers is indifferent to trade-policy reform. Other producers do not know how they would be impacted by liberalization; these tend to be smaller than their counterparts. The relationship between productivity and pro-trade attitudes is robust, even when controlling for a wide range of internationalization modes.

Industry has organized increasingly effective self-governance initiatives since the 1980s. Almost all of these are based on the economic leverage of large retailers and manufacturers over their worldwide supply chains. This article documents commonalities in six of the best-studied examples—coffee, dolphin-safe tuna, fisheries, lumber, food processing, and artificial DNA—and offers straightforward economic and political theories to explain them. The theories teach that oligopoly competition can strongly constrain private power so that firms are answerable to a shadow electorate of consumers. Furthermore, rational firms often benefit from ceding significant power to suppliers and NGOs. These results extend traditional arguments that free markets constrain private power and suggest an explicit framework for deciding when private politics are legitimate.1

This article develops an explanation for patterns of industrial specialization in emerging high-technology industries through a comparative analysis of wind and solar sectors in China, Germany, and the United States. Although governments have held similar industrial policy goals in the support of renewable energy industries, firms in all three economies have established distinct innovative capabilities in response to the policies of the state. This article shows that firms utilize both legacy institutions and engage in relational learning in global networks to carve out distinct niches in emerging industries. Based on an original dataset of more than 200 firm-level interviews, the article suggests that the rise of global value chains has widened the space for national diversity in industrial specialization. Firms no longer have to establish the full range of skills required to bring an idea from lab to market, but can specialize and collaborate with others. In this context, firms respond to industrial policy by incrementally building on existing industrial capabilities and by relying on familiar public resources and institutions, even in emerging industries. These findings point to the role of industrial legacies in shaping firms' positions in global value chains and show that firms are active agents in maintaining distinct industrial specializations and domestic institutions under conditions of globalization.

This article examines bank lobbying in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS). While excessive bank lobbying is routinely linked to weakened banking regulations, we still know little about bank mobilization patterns. In particular, when and why do some banks lobby the BCBS while others do not? I argue that the decision to lobby is a function of two factors: banks’ organizational characteristics and domestic banking regulations. I test my argument using a unique dataset of over 33,000 banks worldwide during the period in which Basel III was negotiated. My findings confirm a pronounced bias in bank mobilization patterns toward wealthy, internationally active banks. I also find that banks facing more stringent banking regulations at home tend to lobby the BCBS in an effort to level the playing field with international competitors. This effect is particularly salient for stringent regulations on banking activities as well as higher capital adequacy requirements.1

The intellectual engagement with multinational enterprises in International Relations has found a new home within the narratives of global governance and corporate social responsibility. Both narratives seem to agree that the role of business has changed as state capacities to provide governance assumingly have diminished and, based on broader social and political responsibilities, enterprises began to participate more actively in the provision of collective goods. Increased participation alone, however, does not reveal how corporate actors define and make sense of their responsibilities and their roles within global governance. In fact, focusing on corporate responsibilities and corporate governance contributions does not consider enterprises as actors in their own right who actively interpret and respond to changes in their normative environments. To fill this gap, the article proposes a framework that conceptualizes corporate agency as inherently social and creative. This framework, which can be applied to different contexts, is illustrated by reconstructing interpretative frames and self-understandings advanced by Shell in response to its crisis in Nigeria during the 1990s. Based on this reconstruction, Shell failed to develop and communicate a clear understanding of its social responsibilities, and its overall integration into global governance is likely to remain an ambiguous process in which uncertainty and indeterminacy prevail.