The sources of protectionist drift in representative democracies

Didier Laussel () and Raymond Riezman

Chapter 14 in International Trade Agreements and Political Economy, 2013, pp 225-246 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: AbstractWe analyze a two country-two good model of international trade in which citizens in each country differ by their specific factor endowments. The trade policy in each country is set by the politician who has been elected by the citizens in a previous stage. Due to a delegation effect citizens generally favor candidates who are more protectionist than they are. The one-candidate-per-country equilibria exhibit a "protectionist drift" owing to this delegation effect. In addition, we find an additional source of protectionist drift that we call the "abstention effect". Not only do candidates wish to delegate to more protectionist colleagues, but these more protectionist colleagues who can win election, prefer still more protectionist candidates than themselves. Therefore, they have an incentive to abstain, that is, not run for election. We show that because of this abstention effect there exists a range of electable citizens all of whom are more protectionist than the median voter's most preferred candidate. We extend the analysis allowing two-candidate equilibria and the possibility that there are costs and benefits of holding office.

Keywords: International Trade; Political Economy; Theory of International Free Trade Agreements; Customs Unions; Tariff Dynamics; Storable Votes (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9789814390125_0014 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789814390125_0014 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
Working Paper: The sources of protectionist drift in representative democracies (2013)
Journal Article: The sources of protectionist drift in representative democracies (2005)
Working Paper: The Sources of Protectionist Drift in Representative Democracies (2001)
Working Paper: The Sources of Protectionist Drift in Representative Democracies (2000)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:wschap:9789814390125_0014

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().