Abstract
This study seeks to discover why representatives vote for or against free trade agreements. It draws upon the sector theory of political economy to explain why legislators vote for free trade agreements, while also drawing upon assumptions from electoral theory to explain legislative behavior. According to the theory, representatives from districts dominated by export sectors, or import-complement sectors, will vote for free trade agreements while those from import-competing districts will vote against them. The theory is tested using the case of the U.S. House of Representatives vote on the enactment of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA) in 2011. The results seem to show that the presence of a significant agricultural sector in a district had a modest positive effect on the likelihood of a legislator voting for KORUS FTA. However, the largest coefficient was on education, the control variable for the factor model, suggesting that support for free trade agreements divided more along factoral lines than sectoral ones.
How to Cite
Kohatsu, A., (2019) “Sectoral Analysis of Economic Factors Affecting Congressional Voting on Free Trade Agreements: A Case Study of KORUS FTA”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 32(1).
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