Lobbying and Agricultural Trade Policy in the United States

By Kishore Gawande, Bernard M. Hoekman. International Organization, 2006

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article studies whether political campaign contributions influence agricultural protection in the United States in the manner suggested by the political economy model of Grossman and Helpman (1994). This is the first attempt to test this model using agricultural data. We test the model using a detailed cross-sectional data set of agricultural protection, subsidies, and PAC contributions in the late 1990s. The model is qualitatively affirmed by the data. We make a novel attempt to solve a puzzle about the model's quantitative implications, also found in recent studies. This solution makes the simple model consistent with the complicated decision-making process in real-world government. The results imply the underpinnings of a political economy equilibrium that will be hard to dislodge.This article has benefited greatly from the insightful comments of the editor and two anonymous referees. We thank Marcelo Olarreaga for access to valuable data on agricultural protection and subsidies. We accept responsibility for any remaining errors. The views expressed are our own and should not be attributed to the World Bank.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/991c88e2eb19837d6f53bceec54f6ce7926d66a2

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Citations in the corpus

Political Economy of Public Policies: Insights from Distortions to Agricultural and Food Markets (2013, unknown): “Gawande and Hoekman (2010) find empirical support for this hypothesis.”
The Political Economy of Agricultural and Food Policies: Recent Contributions, New Insights, and Areas for Further Research (2010, background): “Not surprisingly, the only GH applications in agriculture, as far as I know, are to U.S. agricultural policies by Gawande and Hoekman (2006) and protection of U.S. food industries by Lopez.”
The domestic battle over the design of non-trade issues in preferential trade agreements (2016, background): “Although interest group consultation has never been so formalized as today with, for instance, more than a dozen rounds of stakeholder meetings accompanying TTIP negotiations at the time of writing (15 April 2016), lobbying by firms and unions on trade policy has a long tradition (Gawande and Hoekma”
Domestic Politics and the Formation of International Environmental Agreements (2012, background): “How can we explain this result? Business pressure tends to water down the terms of the agreement by negatively affecting qs; this, in turn, may make it ‘easier’ for countries to cooperate 7For discussions on the link between special interests and government protection, see Gawande and Hoekman (2006)”