This paper examines the political economy of the Orange Revolution in an effort to understand routes by which less democratic postcommunist countries might break with an illiberal status quo. The fusion of Ukraine's rent-seeking economic interests and illiberal political regime produced an unstable equilibrium that is poorly explained by two leading theoretical frameworks: ‘market reform’ and ‘political competition’ theory. Only by combining key insights from each do we get a full explanation of the pressures that generated Ukraine's challenge to illiberalism in 2004. We examine this story with a particular focus on the crisis-prone nature of ‘competitive authoritarian regimes’ and the related strategic calculations of business elites.

Although scholars have begun to explore the determinants of public attitudes toward trade policy, we still do not know whether these attitudes have policy consequences. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of this question. I find that higher public support for free trade leads to lower tariffs, but only in democracies. I also find that democracy leads to lower tariffs only where public support for free trade is relatively high. Hence, although both public opinion and regime type are important, neither matters independently of the other. This finding suggests a need for further research on the conditional effects of both.

Using a panel data of S&P 500 Index firms covering 1998–2004, this paper compares the determinants of lobbying expenditures and campaign contributions and estimates the returns to lobbying as assessed by the financial market. Lobbying depends more on managerial incentives and protection needs beyond industry structures than contributions do. Lobbying also has a positive effect on the firm's equity returns relative to the market and, to a lesser degree, relative to its industry.

In this paper we deconstruct the popular book by Thomas Friedman which argues that the world is integrated through the advent of a new form of globalization based on the Internet. We use the logic of international business strategy to demonstrate that Friedman's examples of worldwide integration are special cases which ignore the empirical realities of multinational enterprises (MNEs). We provide empirical evidence to demonstrate that the world's largest MNEs do not operate globally, but sell and produce the vast majority of their output within their home region of the triad. We develop a new analytical framework to explain the limited nature of Friedman's thinking, and we contrast this with the more robust frameworks available in international business. The latter frameworks, which take into account country level and regional level barriers to integration, are better at explaining the activities of MNEs. We conclude that, from the viewpoint of international business strategy, the prescriptive thinking from Friedman is misleading if it is believed that a global strategy is feasible. Instead, MNEs need to develop strategies to accommodate the realities of intra-regional integration and to overcome the liabilities of inter-regional expansion across the triad.