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

Abstract

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.

Trade Competitiveness, Constituency Interests, and Legislators' Attitudes Towards Trade Agreements

“…While voters elect parties in the former, they can select candidates in the latter. In line with Wagner and Plouffe (2019), Table E13 in the online supporting information suggests that district competitiveness is a particularly strong predictor of trade attitudes in the presence of open lists. Finally, to account for possible nonlinearity in the interaction between competitiveness and ideology, we split the interval‐scaled moderator of political ideology in five groups from left to right.…”

Trade Competitiveness, Constituency Interests, and Legislators’ Attitudes Towards Trade Agreements

“…While voters elect parties in the former, they can select candidates in the latter. In line with Wagner and Plouffe (2019), Table E13 in the Appendix suggests that district competitiveness is a particularly strong predictor of trade attitudes in the presence of open lists. Finally, to account for possible non-linearity in the interaction between competitiveness and ideology, we split the interval-scaled moderator of political ideology in five groups from left to right.…”

The instability of globalization: applying evolutionary game theory to global trade cooperation

“…What is most important, we treat the countries in our population as unitary actors and do not open the black box of domestic politics. The influence of domestic politics on countries' trade policies is discussed extensively in the literature (e.g., Arce et al 2008;Baldwin and Magee 2000;DeVault 2013;Hoffman 2009;Mansfield et al 2000Mansfield et al , 2002Nollen and Iglarsh 1990;Wagner and Plouffe 2019); most public choice models of protectionism concentrate on the domestic realm (e.g., Damania et al 2004;Lake and Linask 2015;Pecorino 1997;Aidt 1997). For the moment, we chose to omit domestic politics and to concentrate on the global dynamics of trade cooperation because this level of analysis has been subject to far less theoretical development over the past two decades.…”

“…Based on the well-known argument that trade liberalization generally is welfare increasing, many scholars propose that protectionist measures result from rent-seeking by concentrated and well-organized interests (Damania et al 2004;Lake and Linask 2015;Pecorino 1997;Aidt 1997). Principally concentrating on the trade policies of the United States, the literature further explores how factors like the rules of electoral competition (Baldwin and Magee 2000;DeVault 2013;Wagner and Plouffe 2019), political ideologies (Hoffman 2009;Nollen and Iglarsh 1990) or economic sensitivities (Arce et al 2008;Nollen and Iglarsh 1990) determine the chances of protectionist interests' success. In contrast, the diffusion literature has shown convincingly that countries do not choose their trade policies independently, but that they observe and influence each other.…”