Inter-Branch Relations in US Trade Policymaking: Balance of Power or Authoritarian Drift?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article analyzes the growing interbranch conflicts inherent to the design of US trade policymaking and the search for a balance of power between the legislative and the executive branches amidst recurrent debates on the merits of globalization. To do so, it traces the origins of these institutional battles and maps out these conflicts across different instruments of the trade policy apparatus. Additionally, it explores the drivers of executive-legislative contention and assesses its complex relations with partisan polarization. The conclusions are two-fold. First, since 1974, under the dual imperative of economic leadership and democratic governance, trade institutions have undergone a bifurcated development where both trade-liberalizing and protective measures developed in both executive and legislative branches. The 1974 Trade Act has played a structuring role in the bicephalous transformation of US trade policymaking, heralding a long legacy of interbranch conflicts amidst stormy debates over globalization and the role that the United States should play in the world economy. Second, in a context of hyperpolarization, institutional mechanisms and legislative reforms can only go so far as to preserve a balance of power necessary to address the tensions between democratic governance and international competitiveness. Beyond the US case, this means that efforts to curtail protectionism cannot be confined to policy recommendations and technocratic solutions, but must address the political and ideological roots of the current globalization fatigue.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.022 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".