Protection with many sellers: An Application to Legislatures with Malapportionment

Abstract

What effect, if any, does legislative malapportionment have on international trade protection? This paper argues that in malapportioned legislatures, such as the U.S. Senate, industries become over-represented in a legislature if they are disproportionately located in small constituencies. As a result, industries that are disproportionately located in smaller constituencies are likely to receive greater protection from international trade. To argue this point theoretically, this paper develops a new model, combining legislative bargaining and a model of lobbying to study trade protection while allowing for a legislature with multiple legislators and differently sized constituencies. We then test the predictions of this new model using tariff votes from the U.S. Senate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a panel of tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade in the U.S. in the 1990s. Considerable support is found for the model's predictions. Industries concentrated in states where the population is low receive greater protection from imports.

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