Leadership Survival and the Process of Economic Integration

• Main Author: Porche, Schuyler Richard
• Other Authors: William A. Clark
• Format: Others
• Language: en
• Published: LSU 2009
• Subjects: Political Science
• Online Access: http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-04022009-110021/

The central contribution of this dissertation to political science is explaining the role of leadership survival theory in shaping the political process of initiation, broadening, deepening, and failure of economic integration agreements by nation states. The empirical research involves the creation of a dataset recording changes in economic integration for the period 1950-1999 and utilizing advanced quantitative methods to study the process. Most existing research focuses on the initiation of trade agreements. I demonstrate that the process of economic integration agreements among polities is shaped by iterated political interaction at both the domestic and international levels. The critical test in this research is the leadership survival prediction that as the number of people needed to keep a leader in office increases the incentives for pursuing public policies changes.