Hiscox, Michael J. High Stakes: The Political Economy of U.S. Trade Sanctions, 1950-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming.

The book examines U.S. sanctions policy from 1950 to 2010, reporting a new and detailed set of data on all trade sanctions imposed on foreign nations by the White House during this period, and all trade sanctions legislation proposed in Congress. It develops a model of sanctions policymaking that incorporates lobbying for organized special interest groups. The book's main argument is that U.S. sanctions policy has been powerfully shaped by domestic political calculations about the economic costs and benefits of different policies for particular groups; only rarely has policy reflected strategic calculations about how best to pressure foreign governments to alter their behavior in line with broader U.S. foreign policy objectives. Besides reporting the new quantitative data, the book presents detailed histories of the evolution of U.S. policy towards Cuba, the Soviet Bloc, South Africa, China, and Iraq. The book will be available from Cambridge University Press in 2012.
 

Hiscox, Michael J. International Trade and Political Conflict: Commerce, Coalitions, and Mobility. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002.

The book provides a general study of political cleavages created by international trade. It addresses one of the oldest debates in political economy — that between class and group-based approaches to analysis — and provides a theoretical synthesis that indicates the conditions under which one approach is more appropriate than the other. It breaks new ground by presenting the first systematic evidence (both historical and cross-national) on levels of inter-industry factor mobility. The book also presents new evidence from the history of trade politics in six western economies over the last two centuries, using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative analysis. You can read reviews of the book, and place an order, at Amazon.com and at Princeton University Press. The book was translated and published in China by Renmin University Press 2005. It won the William H. Riker Prize awarded by the American Political Science Association for the best book in political economy in 2001-2002.