American agriculture and trade policymaking: Two-level bargaining in the North American Free Trade Agreement

This paper has employed Putnam's two-level bargaining framework to analyze the negotiations leading to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The particular focus has been on agricultural aspects of the negotiations between the U.S. and Mexico, identifying the distribution of coalitions and preferences across the U.S. polity that influenced the drafting and ultimate ratification of the agreement. Special emphasis has been given to how the negotiations were influenced by the intersecting of agricultural interests and strategies at both domestic and international levels.