Trading Gains for Control: International Trade Forums and Japanese Economic Diplomacy Saadia M. Pekkanen University of Washington Mireya Solı ´s American University Saori N. Katada University of Southern California The explosive proliferation of trade forums poses fundamental ques- tions about why states forum-shop as they pursue liberalization. We advance a novel argument linking the institutional design of interna- tional trade forums directly to domestic politics. If industrialized demo- cratic states have to appease conflicting forces in the domestic political marketplace as economic liberalization proceeds apace, they should pri- oritize forums that allow them to exert greater control over the pace and scope of liberalization. This prioritization is influenced by a trade- off between two critical dimensions that combine differently across all international trade forums: the gains dimension, which determines the extent to which states can increase economic welfare based on the for- um’s rules; and the control dimension, which determines the extent to which they have power to set the forum’s rules in line with their politi- cal concerns. We use the case of Japan to demonstrate the importance of the gains-control tradeoff. Why do states forum-shop in international trade? More specifically, the explosive proliferation of regional and cross-regional preferential trade agreements urges us to ask, what makes states gravitate away from a multilateral forum toward alternative regional and bilateral ones that intrinsically offer lower economic gains? Research in the field of international political economy (IPE) has thus far concentrated on issues such as the origins, impact, and more recently, design of Authors’ note: We are grateful to the following people for their constructive criticism and advice: Vinod Aggarwal, Miles Kahler, Barbara Koremenos, Peter Katzenstein, Seungjoo Lee, Ed Lincoln, Megumi Naoi, John Odell, Antonio Ortiz Mena, Peter Rosendorff, Shujiro Urata, as well as the reviewers and editors of ISQ. We thank the Center for International Studies at the University of Southern California for its generous funding for the workshop where this project was launched. We appreciate the excellent research assistance provided by Jacob Brown, Jason Enia, Vidal Seegobin, and Christina Gray. Pekkanen acknowledges financial support from the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Profes- sorship. Solı ´s acknowledges financial support from CGP through an Abe fellowship. Ó 2007 International Studies Association. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK. International Studies Quarterly (2007) 51, 945–970 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/isq/article/51/4/945/1865034 by guest on 17 July 2022