International trade is politically contentious. In studying this subject, scholars frequently probe the domestic distributional effects associated with trade and their ramifications for a variety of political phenomena, including the formation of political coalitions, lobbying behavior, electoral preferences, and, most recently, political polarization and the emergence of populism. In Trade Policy in Multilevel Government, Christian Freudlsperger expands the scope of inquiry, investigating how the degree of contentious politics between a national government and its subnational units (executives) affects the content of trade policy across time and space.

Building on Albert Hirschman’s seminal work, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970), Freudlsperger advances a theory of the domestic institutions that enable multilevel political systems to organize openness in a globalized economy. He argues that the more “voice” a multilevel polity grants its constituent units (executives) in trade policy making (e.g., participation in trade negotiations), the less likely the latter are to eventually exit from trade agreements (i.e., to be more inclined to open their markets). The amount of voice that subnational executives enjoy is largely a function of domestic political institutions (e.g., council versus senate federalism, shared versus self-rule) and the degree of “vertical” decision-making processes (e.g., collaborative versus competitive). A subnational executive’s voice may be further magnified or attenuated by market conditions (e.g., importance of trade in the domestic economy) and the politicization of trade policy. As Freudlsperger cogently argues in chapter 2, this framework generates four main hypotheses that he evaluates in three extensive case studies.

The empirical investigation hones in on the “organization” of trade in public procurement services and goods in the United States, Canada, and the European Union (EU). Chapter 3 motivates this research design by carefully documenting the emergence, significance, and increasingly contentious nature of a global trade regime in public procurement. Crucially, Freudlsperger describes varying levels of subnational openness to procurement trade: persistently low in the United States, increasing in Canada, and comparatively high in the EU. Chapters 4–6 attributes much of this variation to a function of the relative voice that subnational executives are able to exercise in the United States, Canada, and the EU. The US case, for example, highlights the limitations of self-rule systems in organizing greater trade openness (in public procurement) across multiple levels of government (i.e., the federal government, US states). Although similar in many institutional arrangements to the United States, Canada has greater “vertical collaboration” among its provinces and the national government, which has facilitated more openness in multilevel trade governance. In contrast to the United States and Canada, the EU case illustrates how shared rule systems are institutionally and procedurally better suited to organize more open multilevel trade. Together, the case studies provide a rich comparative analysis describing why subnational executives have more or less voice (e.g., stemming from their founding constitutions) and its implications for trade liberalization.

In applying Hirschman’s framework to intergovernmental relations, the book introduces a new theoretical perspective for understanding the domestic political economy of trade. Central to this is bargaining among the relevant decision makers. For Freudlsperger, the decisive agents are the national government and its constituent units. In international trade, of course, bargaining also occurs across national governments. Scholarship on “two-level games” shows how greater participation (voice) by subnational actors can constrain the set of agreeable policies (i.e., the “win set”) in negotiations among sovereign states, both in bilateral and multilateral settings. Relatedly, the number, strength, and preferences of domestic veto players (e.g., domestic legislatures, partisanship among subnational executives) can further constrain the win set. Although Freudlsperger acknowledges these arguments, surprisingly the theory underemphasizes the countervailing effects of greater subnational voice on the negotiated trade deal forged among national governments. The book’s central hypotheses, for example, do not “net out” the effect of veto players.

At a more fundamental level, the book’s theoretical setup assumes the same underlying utility function across all relevant decision makers. This assumption may be problematic and tautological. For example, as Freudlsperger describes in great detail, the EU is a “market-making polity” (p. 220) that has purposefully fostered institutions and practices to achieve greater trade liberalization among its constituent units (member states). In contrast, the objectives of the national governments in the United States and Canada are more multifaceted (e.g., considerations of national security, redistributive policies), goals that can be at odds with trade liberalization. Given these differences in utility functions, it is perhaps unsurprising that trade in procurement is more open in the EU relative to the United States and Canada.

Turning to the empirics, there are several areas that could strengthen the book’s evaluation of the theory. One relates to the absence of efforts to gauge the causal effects linking subnational voice to the content of trade policy. This is surprising, because there are a plethora of data and several quasi-experimental settings (e.g., the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which Freudlsperger argues decreased the voice of state governors) that could probe cause-and-effect relationships, either qualitatively or with statistical methods. Another area involves case selection. Although Freudlsberger provides compelling evidence that the United States, Canada, and the EU are good cases for evaluating the book’s theoretical conjectures, it is unclear why other plausible cases, particularly developing countries, are not considered for investigation. This omission is curious given the tremendous growth of international trade stemming from developing-country regions and the prevalence of multilevel political systems in key trading countries, such as China and India. This suggests that some underlying (and unspecified) scope conditions may be relevant for applying the book’s theory, including the quality of legislative and judicial institutions, the fiscal capacities of subnational units, the organization and overlapping jurisdictions of multilevel governments, and their interactions with each other.

On the whole, these empirical and theoretical concerns are not fatal to Freudlsperger’s central argument. Rather they can be viewed as potential avenues for future research. Indeed, the book opens a conversation for exploring the implications of multilevel governance and international trade—and potentially other elements of globalization (e.g., foreign direct investment, cooperation on the environment, financial regulations)—in countries with developing and developed economies, and perhaps across different political institutional arrangements and regime types. As such, the book contributes to several literatures. Freudlsperger situates his argument and evidence squarely in scholarship on the dynamics of multilevel government and comparative federalism, with a deep dive into EU politics. Undeniably, the book makes contributions in these areas. More broadly, the book’s insights may be generalizable to other facets of cross-border economic activity and should appeal to scholars in comparative political institutions, international relations, and political economy.