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Opening Up By Cracking Down: Labor Repression and Trade Liberalization in Democratic Developing Countries

Cambridge University Press: Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions (October 2022).

Opening Up By Cracking Down argues that democratic developing countries often used labor repression - the violation of workers’ basic rights to act collectively - to overcome labor union opposition to trade liberalization. Some democratic governments brazenly jailed union leaders and used police brutality to break the strikes that unions launched against such economic reforms. Others weakened labor union opposition through more subtle tactics, such as restricting workers' rights to organize, banning strikes, or retaliating against striking workers. Either way, democratic developing countries were more likely to open their economies during the late-twentieth century if they violated labor rights. This book supports this argument with a multi-method approach that draws on original archival research and fieldwork interviews on trade politics in Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Turkey, and India, as well as cross-national quantitative analysis of data from over one hundred developing countries.

Adam Dean’s powerful book on trade liberalization by democratic developing countries reveals that labor repression is what both enables open economies and weakens democracy. His is a masterful and compelling piece of work that enriches our understanding of development, democracy, and labor unions.
Margaret Levi, Stanford University

Developing economies became more open to international trade during the last three decades, as the number of democracies in the developing world increased.
Adam Dean’s fascinating book significantly enhances our understanding of trade politics by revealing that democratic governments were more likely to liberalize their trade regimes when they repressed labor rights.
Dani Rodrik, Harvard University

Adam Dean’s path-breaking work reveals how repressive government tactics against labor unions and workers were a key element of the path to trade liberalization. Bold, innovative, and full of lively prose, this book provides a blueprint for how to study the political dynamics underlying today’s global economy.
Kathleen McNamara, Georgetown University

In Opening Up by Cracking Down, Adam Dean proves that no serious student of international political economy can neglect the crucial role of labor unions – and, even more, of democratic governments’ repression of unions – in setting trade policy in new democracies.
Ron Rogowski, University of California, Los Angeles


From Conflict to Coalition: Profit-Sharing Institutions and the Political Economy of Trade

Cambridge University Press: Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions (September, 2016).

Finalist for the 2017 J. David Greenstone Book Prize

International trade often inspires intense conflict between workers and their employers. In this book, Adam Dean studies the conditions under which labor and capital actually join together in support of the same trade policies. He argues that capital-labor agreement on trade policy depends upon the presence or absence of "profit-sharing institutions." Dean tests this theory with a multi-method approach. Case studies on the United States, Britain, and Argentina in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries offer a revisionist history that puts class conflict at the center of the political economy of trade. Quantitative analysis of data from over one hundred countries from 1986 to 2002 demonstrates that the field's conventional wisdom systematically exaggerates the benefits that workers receive from trade policy reforms. From Conflict to Coalition boldly explains why labor is neither an automatic beneficiary nor an automatic ally of capital when it comes to trade policy and distributional conflict.

Adam Dean's book is an exciting addition to the literature on the political economy of trade. The book contains innovative theoretical insights concerning profit-sharing institutions and their role in shaping trade policy preferences of workers. By using a careful multi-method approach, Dean is able to trace the origins of these labor institutions as well as their influence on trade policy across a wide variety of countries. This book should be read by any scholar interested in the political economy of trade policy.
Jon Pevehouse, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Adam Dean's fascinating book makes a strong case that analysts of international trade policy have failed to take into account whether an industry has profit-sharing institutions. Dean's claim is that profit-sharing institutions are critical in generating solidarity between industry and labor - either for protection or liberal trade.
Robert O. Keohane, Princeton University

In an era when globalization is under assault from the Left and Right across the developed world, Adam Dean presents a provocative new argument about the politics of trade protection. Exploiting firm-level heterogeneity in what he calls profit-sharing institutions, Dean persuasively shows that workers support protection only when they share in the rents created by trade barriers. This is a tremendous book of history with great contemporary relevance.
David A. Lake, University of California, San Diego

From Conflict to Coalition is an important and original book in which Adam Dean decisively advances scholarly understanding of the political economy of globalization. Drawing on meticulous research for a series of elegantly constructed case studies, Dean examines the conditions under which organized labour comes to share or dissent from the international trade policy preferences of employers. The result is a major scholarly publication, which will be of interest to researchers in economic history, American political development, and international political economy.
Desmond King, University of Oxford