Hey all, Below is our abstract. Enjoy. Liberalization versus Sustained Openness? Remodeling the Impact of Democratization on the Initial Move to Free Trade Is the process of democratization associated with trade liberalization in lesser-developed countries? Milner and Kubota (2005) argue that the transition to democracy prevents political leaders from using trade barriers to secure electoral support: their empirical analysis finds a positive relationship between democratization and openness. Using nonparametric matching procedures, we demonstrate that these results conflate the impact of democratization with simple policy inertia: governments who have liberalized their trade regimes in the past are more likely to sustain liberalized trade regimes in the future, despite the democratization of their political regimes. We then employ a rare events logit model to show that there is no association between democratization and the initial onset of trade liberalization.