Rogowski: Commerce and Coalitions

Rogowski, Ronald. (1989). Commerce and coalitions : how trade affects domestic political alignments. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

This text posits that there will be domestic political coalitions or divisions based on a country’s natural relative endowments if they engage in free trade. He creates a handy metric for determining whether or not there will be tension in a given country that is a 2x2 box. Along the x-axis there is a distinction made between countries that are relatively abundant in land or labor. Along the Y axis, countries are separated into relatively capital rich and poor nations.

This is not an attempt to explain all of the effects of trade, but rather to provide a metric that can potentially be useful in determining some of the effects of increased or decreased trade on different coalitions in a given nation. The remainder of the text is an attempt to apply the theory to historical example. At times this is seamless and elegant, and other times it stretches too far to make causal connections that do not exist.