International Institutions and Issue Linkage February 2004 and Josling 1990;Paarlberg 1997;Orden,Paarlberg, and Roe 1999).The EU devotes more than half of its TABLE 1. Types of Negotiation Contexts ncluded in the Dataset total budget expenditures to agricultural programs,and European officials openly discuss the need to reform Percentage agricultural policies in order to reduce expenditures.13 Japan EU If budget constraints are the force behind liberal- Trade Arena (153 Cases) (114 Cases) ization,then one would expect liberalization to occur Tokyo Round 18.95 11.40 during periods of belt-tightening when there is a reduc- Uruguay Round 12.42 22.81 tion in agricultural budget expenditures.Conversely, Dispute adjudication 29.41 36.84 one could also argue that rising expenditures will make Bilateral 34.64 28.95 governments want to start cutting programs so they APEC 4.58 would be more likely to liberalize agricultural poli- cies when agricultural budgets grow rapidly.The role of commodity prices further complicates the budget dispute adjudication cases as well as negotiations out- dynamic because low commodity prices increase both side of the GATT/WTO institutional framework,such agricultural budget expenditures and farmer demand as bilateral talks and the 1998 Kuala Lumpur meet- for protection.This article provides one test of the role ing of APEC(Table 1).14 Some of the negotiations in of agricultural budget growth,but further analysis is the dataset addressed only agricultural trade barriers, necessary to explain the connections between prices, while others involved multiple sectors.A negotiation spending,and trade protection. on an agricultural trade barrier forms the unit of anal- ysis.A negotiation is defined as an "exchange between Number of Participants two or more countries that begins with a demand for policy reform and concludes when there is either an Another important characteristic of many interna- agreement or a decision to indefinitely halt talks on the tional negotiations is multilateralism.The term multi- issue"(Davis 2003,85).The Appendix provides details lateralism often refers to both multiple countries nego- on coding rules. tiating and the kind of institutions that are established Each case is a single commodity or commodity group to facilitate such negotiations.This tendency to conflate among those being negotiated.Hence,in a large ne- the institutional features of the negotiation structure gotiation like the Uruguay Round there are multiple with the number of participants can interfere with anal- cases,while another negotiation will focus exclusively ysis of the sources of cooperation.I evaluate whether on a single commodity.Within negotiations,there is it is the number of participants per se or the need for considerable variation that can be hidden by aggrega- linkage that accompanies negotiations with many par- tion of products.During the Tokyo Round,for example, ticipants that provides the leverage of multilateralism. no liberalization occurred for grains,while both Japan Studies about whether more is better have con- and the EU agreed to partial changes for beef.Multi- cluded that it depends on the issue and the nature ple negotiations on a single commodity are treated as of the cooperation problem (Kahler 1992;Martin separate cases when there is a clear initiation and end 1992;Sebenius 1983).On the one hand,more partic- to one negotiation and a second initiation for the next ipants promote cooperation because there are more negotiation.In order to consider the special nature of opportunities to find agreements with mutual gains. such repeated talks on similar issues,I include a count Multiple countries making the same demand as the variable for the number of the particular negotiation in United States could increase the pressure for liberaliza- the sequence of negotiations on the same product. tion.On the other hand,the problem of free-riding and Negotiated policy liberalization is defined as the re- the difficulty of bargaining increase with large numbers duction of explicit trade barriers through agreement in (Oye 1985).One could also argue that the lack of coun- negotiation.Negotiation outcomes are categorized into terbalancing by a coalition would make it easier for the three levels of liberalization:none,minor,and major United States to maximize its leverage in a bilateral policy change.The explanatory variables used to pre- negotiation.Therefore,the number of participants rep- dict liberalization are summarized in Table 2,and de- resents an important feature of the negotiation context. scriptive statistics and coding definitions are provided in the Appendix.I test my main argument using a link- age variable that is a four-level ordinal scale for the AGRICULTURAL TRADE NEGOTIATION institutionalization of an issue linkage between agri- DATA cultural and other sectoral issues.Cases negotiated in I analyze an original dataset of 267 cases of agricultural the Uruguay Round are coded four for the strongest commodities that were the subject of U.S.negotiations linkage while Tokyo Round cases are coded three for with Japan or the EU during the period between 1970 and 1999.The dataset includes both trade rounds and 14In Table 1.a case is categorized as dispute adjudication if a for mal complaint was filed under GATT or WTO dispute settlement procedures.Some cases ended after consultations,while others were 13 The European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund ex. concluded after a final panel ruling.See Busch and Reinhardt 2001 penditures on agricultural policies were 89%of the 1970 total EC and Davis 2003a for analysis of the effect that these rules have on budget and 51%of the 1999 budget(EC 1999). trade negotiations. 160 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.Further reproduction prohibited without permission.Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission