Electoral regime and trade policy

Hatfield, John William; Hauk, William R.

doi:10.1016/j.jce.2014.04.003

Cited by 10 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Other scholars reach analogous conclusions with different arguments: Knutsen (2011) contends that landslide wins under plurality rules lead to more rent seeking and particularistic policy-making by legislators; Saksena and Anderson (2008) attribute the link between PR systems and liberal trade policies to the insulation of politicians from special interest lobbying. Ito (2015), Grossman and Helpman (2005) and Hatfield and Hauk (2014) all find evidence of a relationship between PR systems and freer trade policies in panel analyses across a range of samples.…”

Section: The Domestic Politics Of Tradementioning

confidence: 88%

“…GDP per capita (based on purchasing power parity) is used to capture levels of economic development and is expected to be positively associated with trade openness. Country size, measured in terms of land mass, is entered as well; that variable has been associated with trade dependence (Hatfield and Hauk 2014); it is plausible that country size produces similar effects on trade barriers. Unemployment is included because governments facing high levels of unemployment are likely to face more pressure for protectionist policies.…”

Section: Independent Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The most common way of operationalizing electoral systems in studies of trade politics has been a dichotomous indicator, distinguishing systems labelled as either plurality (or majoritarian) or proportional representation (PR), despite significant differences between countries' institutional arrangements within both of those groups. Despite several innovations along these lines (such as Hankla 2006;Ehrlich 2007;Park and Jensen 2007), recent contributions to the literature have continued to point to the need for greater nuance in the measurement of electoral systems in the study of trade politics (Menocal 2011;Hatfield and Hauk 2014;Rickard 2015). We answer that call and present an index that captures personal vote-cultivation incentives, based on the seminal work of Carey and Shugart (1995) and informed by recent empirical contributions by André et al (2016), accounting for variation among electoral systems well beyond the standard majoritarian-PR divide.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Electoral systems and trade-policy outcomes: the effects of personal-vote incentives on barriers to international trade

Wagner

Plouffe

2019

Public Choice

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Despite established benefits in free trade, protectionism persists to varying degrees across the world. Why is that? Political institutions govern the ways in which competing tradepolicy preferences are aggregated, shaping policy outcomes. The ubiquitous binary PR/ plurality indicator in the trade-politics literature is divorced from comparative institutional research. We build on the latter body of research to generate a new 13-point index that captures the extent to which electoral systems incentivize personal-vote cultivation, based on a combination of established theoretical and new empirical evidence on candidate incentives. We argue that institutional incentives to pursue a personal vote are positively linked to the provision of particularistic policies, including trade protectionism. We find strong empirical support for the hypothesized relationship, and our results highlight the importance of applying parsimonious approaches to studying domestic institutions when analyzing their impact on foreign economic policy.

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Section: The Domestic Politics Of Tradementioning

confidence: 88%

Section: Independent Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Electoral systems and trade-policy outcomes: the effects of personal-vote incentives on barriers to international trade

Wagner

Plouffe

2019

Public Choice

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“…Other relevant papers include Hatfield and Hauk (2004), who find lower tariffs for majoritarian systems based on data for 34 Latin American and OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s. Using a broader data set, however, Hatfield and Hauk (2010) find more trade protection in countries with majoritarian electoral systems, in comparison to countries with list-PR electoral systems.…”

Section: Electoral Systems and Trade Policymentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral systems and protectionism: an industry‐level analysis

Ardelean

Evans

2013

Canadian J of Economics

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Our paper advances the previous literature on the relationship between electoral systems and trade protection in several ways. First, our paper is the first to incorporate disaggregated, product‐level data in a cross‐country study. We find that prior cross‐country results, based on national average tariffs, mask a great deal of underlying industry‐level variation. Second, we introduce an innovative proxy for geographic concentration of ownership that varies both by industry and by country. We find that geographic concentration helps to explain the industry heterogeneity. Greater geographic concentration is linked to higher average tariffs, a finding consistent with the theoretical model.

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“…Hatfield and Hauk () obtain the opposite theoretical and empirical result, i.e. that proportional systems lead to higher average tariffs than majoritarian regimes.…”

Section: Introduction and Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 98%

Comparative Trade Policy

Wiberg

2014

Rev International Economics

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Current research has found ambiguous theoretical and empirical results with respect to the effects of the type of electoral regime on trade policy. The present paper aims to reconcile the different views within a theoretical model. It is shown that the equilibrium level of trade protection can be relatively higher, as well as lower, under a majoritarian electoral rule compared with proportional representation. Trade policy is more (less) protectionist under proportional electoral regimes, as compared with majoritarian institutions, if swing districts are populated by relatively more (less) factor owners with stakes in the exporting sector. It is also shown that politicians optimally apply a lower (higher) level of rent seeking under the majoritarian electoral rule if there are relatively more factor owners in the swing districts with stakes in the exporting (import-competing) sector.

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Electoral regime and trade policy

Cited by 10 publications

References 24 publications

Electoral systems and trade-policy outcomes: the effects of personal-vote incentives on barriers to international trade

Electoral systems and trade-policy outcomes: the effects of personal-vote incentives on barriers to international trade

Electoral systems and protectionism: an industry‐level analysis

Comparative Trade Policy

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