Some protrade business interests that are against hard enforcement of labor and environmental provisions in trade deals may end up eventually supporting it, while others stick to their initial opposition. Why? When will their positions change? The existing literature would expect protrade interests to be more or less in favor of non-trade issues in trade policies according to how dependent on the international economy they are. However, longitudinal variation in export- and import-dependence does not suffice to explain change of the sort I am interested in. I argue that the position of protrade business interests change as they accumulate experiences on the negotiation/ratification of trade deals. To probe that argument, I present two paired comparisons analyzing the position of protrade business interests as pertains to the use of sanctions to enforce labor and environmental provisions in preferential trade agreements (PTAs) signed by Canada and Australia, and by the United States (US) and European Union (EU) between 1993 and 2019. My analysis points to the overall plausibility of my hypothesis and to avenues for future research. The paper helps understand the political activity of business interests on trade and sustainable development and can shed new light on the politics behind the design of social and environmental provisions in PTAs.

This study aims to deepen our understanding of social investment expansion proposing a political learning mechanism to link existing institutional and political explanations. When resources are limited, increased spending in social investment often comes at the expense of politically costly retrenchment of established social insurance policies. Previous studies suggest that this trade-off results in existing entitlements crowding out new policies, and that party ideology plays less of a role in determining social policy expansion. I argue that this is because parties face an electoral dilemma, as individual preferences for social investment and social insurance have been shown to differ between groups that partly overlap in their voting behaviour. Applying a policy diffusion framework to the analysis of childcare expenditure, this study proposes that policymakers learn from the political consequences of past decisions made by their foreign counterparts and update their policy choice accordingly. The econometric analysis of OECD data on childcare expenditure shows that governments tend to make spending decisions that follow those of ideologically similar cabinets abroad and that left-wing governments with a divided electorate tend to reduce childcare expenditure if a previous expansionary decision of a foreign incumbent is followed by an electoral defeat. The findings have implications for the study of the politics of social policy development.

This special section deals with China's longstanding fascination with Singapore's development experience that has preoccupied post-Maoist leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Xi Jinping despite the obvious differences between the tiny Southeast Asian city-state and the most populous country on earth. In particular, there is great Chinese interest in Singapore's success in combining effective governance and efficient state capitalism with stable one-party dominant rule. As a consequence, Chinese observers paid much less attention to electoral democracies that were well-governed states with mature economies.

Over the past three decades, a reform movement bent on improving schools and educational outcomes through standards-based accountability systems and market-like competitive pressures has dominated policy debates. Many have examined reform policies’ effects on academic outcomes, but few have explored these policies’ influence on citizens’ political orientations. In this study, using data from an original survey, I examine whether and how No Child Left Behind’s accountability-based architecture influences parents’ attitudes towards the government and federal involvement in education. I find little evidence that diversity in parents’ lived policy experiences shapes their political orientations. However, the results of a survey experiment suggest that information linking school experience to policy and government action may increase parents’ confidence in their ability to contribute to the political process. Understanding whether and under what conditions parents use public school experiences to inform orientations towards the government can improve the design of future reforms.