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2001; Prasad et al. 2003). These debates have not been
resolved. Nevertheless, few policy choices are as fundamental
as those that determine how a national economy
should engage—or resist—the forces of economic
globalization.
Despite its centrality to the economic history of the
last third of the twentieth century, we know little about
the conditions that underlie the ebb and flow of liberalization
worldwide. The political economy literature
has typically assumed that the most important political
processes to model are largely internal to each national
polity. Scholars have built theory about the preferences
of domestic actors for liberalization (Frieden
1991; Rogowski 1989), explored the partisan sources of
economic and financial policy (Epstein and Schor 1992;
Simmons 1994), and linked the rent-seeking behavior
of governments to resistance to opening the economy
(Alesina, Grilli, and Milesi-Ferretti 1994; Leblang
1997). These benchmark works tend to play down or
neglect altogether the role of international politics or
broader external social relations. The risk is high that
political economy models of economic liberalization
have been under- or even misspecified.
As we show, evidence indicates that transitions to
economic liberalization cluster in time and space. The
question is,What can account for these tides of foreign
economic policy liberalization and restriction? A crucial
explanation, we believe, lies in policy diffusion,1 in
which the decision to liberalize (or restrict) by some
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