Lobbying for International Free Trade Agreements: A Comprehensive Study of Effective Advocacy Tactics Applied during USMCA Negotiations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines the role of lobbying as a profession in the United States, as seen through advocacy efforts for and against the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), an agreement which initially started as a very controversial piece of legislation and ultimately passed with significant bipartisan support. The thesis aims to answer one overarching question: what were the most effective lobbying tactics applied during the USMCA free trade agreement? Through an in-depth analyses of vocational lobbying, ethical and legal guidelines for lobbying rules of conduct, America’s tumultuous relationship with free trade, a USMCA case study, along with interviews with career lobbyists, business professionals, and congressional staffers, this thesis generates insight into lobbying efforts pertaining to the USMCA. Evaluating the controversial vocation of federal lobbying as applied during the USMCA negotiations can unearth a more nuanced finding of the role lobbying for international trade agreements plays in the contemporary United States.
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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 | 0.016 | 0.027 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".