In the 1990s, the American executive organized financial rescues for Mexico and several Asian economies.These rescue, were controversial in Congress, where members voted repeatedly to reduce or eliminate the executive's freedom to engage in them. I analyze these roll calls with an eye toward explaining who opposes and who supports international financial rescues. I argue that the interests of private actors (district constituencies and interest groups) have an important effect on member voting. Following Stolper-Samuelson reasoning, I find that a member is significantly more likely to favor (oppose) rescues as the proportion of high-skilled (low-skilled) workers in a district increases. In addition, I find that campaign contributions from international banks increase the probability that a member will vote in favor of rescues. Overall, the findings suggest that the distributional effects of rescues find expression in Congress and constrain U.S. international financial policymaking.

When do local economic conditions dominate the politics of globalization? Despite growing interest in region-level analyses, little theoretical or empirical work explores the conditions under which the local economy matters. I integrate regions and migration between regions--i.e., geographic mobility--into the traditional factor-based model of trade politics. This economic geography model reveals that regional trade exposure, in contrast to occupational or industry exposure, will most predict trade positions and voting where significant barriers to geographic mobility exist. To measure regional exposure, I exploit plausibly exogenous variation in Mexican net import competition that followed the implementation of NAFTA. To evaluate heterogeneous effects by geographic mobility, I use a battery of novel and conventional measures: geo-located length of residency, machine learning predictions of migration status, changes in region population, and domestic inflows and outflows from US Commuter Zones. An analysis of county vote shares for two anti-trade populists--Ross Perot (1992-96) and Donald Trump (2016)--shows that local NAFTA exposure increased vote shares for these candidates by an average 1.7 and 1.4 percentage points, respectively. However, both results were highly conditional on geographic mobility. Perot's NAFTA-boost was strongest among those with observable barriers to migration. Trump's NAFTA-boost only materialized in 2016 in regions with limited emigration rates. In contrast, no electoral trade backlash occurred where communities recovered by shedding excess workers. The theory explains 13.6 and 20.1 percent of the variation in these candidates' vote shares. An analysis of public opinion data from a 1992-96 panel shows that these patterns are consistent with NAFTA's effects on private welfare and trade policy preferences. In the European context, an analysis of the China trade shock and regional election data from twenty-eight countries over twenty-six years reveals a high degree of external validity for the theory. Given declining mobility rates, the results from this dissertation suggest a growing political importance of the local economy in globalization politics.

How do cultural and economic issues interact in voter decision-making? This dissertation explores this question with a study on expectations of public service provision in Brazil. Existing work shows that economic decline exacerbates reactions against progressive value change, providing insights into the interplay between culture and economics in vote choice. This work advances our knowledge by presenting evidence that cultural values (i.e., positions on LGBTQ and abortion rights) shape expectations of public service provision. Voters expect candidates with shared cultural values to behave more ethically and, therefore, provide better public services. Moreover, this study shows evidence that information about candidate track records moderates the impact of cultural values on vote choice.

This study's hypotheses originate from 33 semi-structured interviews. Interview data indicate that participants are primarily concerned with public service provision and seek information on candidates’ public service records. However, shared cultural values remain critical because participants use them to make important inferences. Candidates with shared cultural values are thought to be more honest and care more about constituents. Because these qualities are associated with public service provision, participants expect candidates with shared cultural values to be better public service providers.

To test the hypotheses resulting from interview data, I field a conjoint experiment with manipulated mediators (n=2,743) where participants assess fictitious candidates for mayor. The conjoint design randomizes candidates' positions on cultural issues (LGBTQ and abortion rights), with a second randomization revealing or omitting their public service records. I find that voters expect candidates with shared cultural values to be more ethical and, therefore, better public service providers. Participants rely more heavily on cultural values when records are omitted, suggesting that candidates with less experience have stronger incentives to campaign on cultural issues.

Understanding the role of cultural values in vote choice carries implications for understanding the politics of inclusivity, distributive justice, and democratic resilience. Moreover, given how right-wing populist candidates often pose as outsiders and mobilize culturally conservative voters, this work carries implications for our understanding of support for populism.

Throughout history, sovereigns have borrowed from banks, bondholders, other countries, and international institutions to fund their policy objectives. Without international laws to enforce the lending promise, many have puzzled over why lenders lend and why borrowers repay. However, few have asked what happens after default breaks the lending contract. How do borrowers and lenders negotiate a new contract? Who bears the distributive consequences of a broken commitment?

I analyze the debt restructuring process as a bargaining game over the size of creditor concessions, or "haircuts," which vary from zero to reductions in payments above 80%. I argue that governments' political will to repay their foreign debt is private information for which the political leadership has incentives to misrepresent. Not only do governments have incentives to plead distress to lenders, they have reasons to hide their economic distress from voters who will punish the government for financial mismanagement. Governments that are unwilling to pay, however, can convey their ``type" by publicly signaling their distress and invoking political punishment. I build on this political economy model to derive and test several hypotheses in four empirical chapters.

Using both quantitative and qualitative evidence alongside original data on creditor characteristics, I find that public declarations of debt distress do indeed elicit higher creditor concessions, but only where the action is politically costly. I also offer an extension of the model to investigate how creditor heterogeneity effects governments' preferences for costly signaling. Disperse groups of creditors are more difficult to coordinate and governments are more willing to use costly signaling as the number of creditors increases.

My findings provide important insights into debt restructuring specifically and the role of domestic politics in international negotiations generally. By introducing new variation to the processes and outcomes of debt restructuring, I lay new groundwork for analyzing how debt crises are resolved. I also demonstrate that leaders can strategically induce political costs born in equilibrium, in order to win concessions from their international negotiating partners. Leaders go public not because of appeals to transparency or democratic idealism, but because electoral constraints can be strategically leveraged to win favorable outcomes.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is a regulatory agency within the United States (US) federal government. To ensure consumer health, the FDA has been responsible for inspecting domestic food facilities within the US throughout modern American history. Since 2008, the FDA's regulatory mandate has extended overseas, with the stationing of inspectors abroad. These inspectors intrusively oversee the increasingly globalized US food supply chain stretching around the world. As of 2013, the FDA inspectors have conducted inspections of registered foreign food facilities more than 5,000 times in 61 countries. It has also set up several foreign offices in Asia, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Middle East. Why are these inspectors enforcing US domestic food safety standards in foreign countries?

This anomalous pattern of US inspectors overseeing food safety standards within borders of foreign governments is best conceived as a form of ``extraterritoriality.'' My dissertation explains this emerging US-led extraterritoriality with three general theoretical claims in chapter 2. First, food safety is a policy area in which government regulators persistently intervene because it has distributional impacts on private producers and consumers. Second, a government regulator can credibly assure consumers of food safety in international trade when its domestic political institutions empower consumers; by contrast, when domestic political institutions are biased against consumers, the government regulator cannot make it. Third, the political approval of a pro-consumer government regulator's extraterritorial regulation comes with a greater reciprocal access to its domestic market, thus giving foreign producers and their governments positive selective incentives to support the extraterritorial regulation.

I adopt a mixed-method approach to validate three general theoretical claims empirically. Chapter 3 qualitatively demonstrates that government regulators have been persistently intervening in food safety governance throughout history. Moreover, it shows that policymakers are well aware of distributional impacts of food safety on private producers and consumers. Chapter 4 experimentally shows that the US FDA can more credibly assure consumers of the safety of food in the US-China bilateral food trade than its Chinese equivalent in two coordinated surveys of American and Chinese citizens. This is consistent with my second claim about credibility. Chapter 5 constructs an interrupted time-series quasi-experiment to show that the foreign approval of US extraterritorial regulation comes with a greater reciprocal access to the US domestic market, giving foreign government regulators incentives to accept US inspectors beyond borders. This supports my third theoretical claim about reciprocity.

Together, my dissertation makes two contributions to the field of international relations. First, it is the first systematic study on food safety, which has not been explored in previous research on world politics. Second, in order to explain the anomalous extraterritorial governance of food safety, it develops a revised open-economy politics approach to global governance that more closely integrate international political dynamics into models rooted in domestic politics.