Previous studies of WTO dispute settlement have sought to evaluate whether a Member's legal capacity influences its odds of bringing litigation before the multilateral trade regime. Because direct measures of legal capacity are elusive, these studies have had to use indirect proxies, such as per capita income or number of delegates in Geneva. Yet, the reliability of these measures is questionable. To gauge legal capacity more directly, we surveyed all WTO Members, posing questions concerning their professional staff, bureaucratic organization at home, bureaucratic organization in Geneva, experience handling general WTO matters, and involvement in WTO litigation. Using responses from this survey, we constructed an index of Members' WTO legal capacity that speaks more fully to the challenges of dispute settlement than do commonly used proxies, none of which are strongly correlated with our measure. We supplemented this survey with over three dozen semi-structured interviews with Members' representatives in Geneva, the results of which bear out the importance of properly measuring legal capacity.

During the past half-century, states have established a large number of international trade institutions, both multilateral and regional in scope. The existing literature on this topic emphasizes that these agreements are chiefly designed to liberalize and increase the flow of overseas commerce. Yet such institutions have another function that has been largely ignored by researchers, namely, reducing volatility in trade policy and trade flows. Exposure to global markets increases the vulnerability of a country's output to terms of trade shocks. Governments seek to insulate their economies from such instability through membership in international trade institutions, particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO) and preferential trading arrangements (PTAs). We hypothesize that these institutions reduce the volatility of overseas commerce. We further hypothesize that, because market actors prefer price stability, trade institutions increase the volume of foreign commerce by reducing trade variability. This article conducts the first large-scale, multivariate statistical tests of these two hypotheses, using annual data on exports for all pairs of countries from 1951 through 2001. The tests provide strong support for our arguments. PTAs and the WTO regime significantly reduce export volatility. In so doing, these institutions also increase export levels.

Do flexibility provisions in international agreements—clauses allowing for legal suspension of concessions without abrogating the treaty—promote cooperation? Recent work emphasizes that provisions for relaxing treaty commitments can ironically make states more likely to form agreements and make deeper concessions when doing so. This argument has particularly been applied to the global trade regime, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). Yet the field has not produced much evidence bearing on this claim. Our article applies this claim to the global trade regime and its chief flexibility provision, antidumping. In contrast to prior work, this article explicitly models the endogeneity and selection processes envisioned by the theory. We find that states joining the WTO are more likely to adopt domestic antidumping mechanisms. Likewise, corrected for endogeneity, states able to take advantage of the regime's principal flexibility provision, by having a domestic antidumping mechanism in place, are significantly more likely to (1) join the WTO, (2) agree to more tightly binding tariff commitments, and (3) implement lower applied tariffs as well.

Disputes filed at the World Trade Organization (WTO) are attracting a growing number of third parties. Most observers argue that their participation influences the institution's rulings. The authors argue that third parties undermine pretrial negotiations; their influence on rulings is conditioned by this selection effect. They test their hypotheses, along with the conventional wisdom, using a data set of WTO disputes initiated through 2002. Consistent with the authors' argument, they find that third-party participation lowers the prospects for early settlement. Controlling for this selection effect, the evidence also suggests that third-party support increases the chances of a legal victory at the WTO.

Does the geographic concentration of industry ‘matter’ outside the United States? Observers have long speculated that while geographically concentrated industries may be influential in American politics, this is probably not the case in countries where the electorate votes more as a national constituency. Others disagree, urging that clustered industries have an advantage regardless of how the political map is drawn. We sharpen the terms of debate and weigh in with empirical evidence from a cross-sectional analysis of intended voter turnout in eight member-states of the European Union and a multi-year study of voter turnout in the Netherlands. These tests uniformly show that, across different types of electoral systems, including those in which voters vote as a national constituency, thereby removing any effects of electoral geography per se, workers in traded industries that are physically concentrated are, in fact, substantially more likely to vote than employees in traded but geographically dispersed sectors.

Preferential trading arrangements (PTAs) have spread widely over the past fifty years. During the same era, multilateral openness has grown to unprecedented heights, spurred by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and its successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO). If the cornerstone of the manifestly successful multilateral regime is nondiscrimination, why have its members increasingly resorted to preferential liberalization? We argue that developments at the heart of GATT/WTO encourage its members to form PTAs as devices to obtain bargaining leverage within the multilateral regime. Specifically, the growth in GATT/WTO membership, the periodic multilateral trade negotiation rounds, as well as participation and, especially, losses in formal GATT/WTO disputes, have led its members to seek entrance into PTAs. Conducting the first statistical tests on the subject, we find strong evidence in support of this argument.