The forthcoming article “Trains, trade, and transformation: A spatial Rogowski theory of America’s 19th-century protectionism” by Kenneth Scheve and Theo Serlin is summarized by the author(s) below.
Do the groups that benefit from economic change become more powerful and get to implement their preferred policies? Many theories in political economy assume so, but the empirical record isn’t so straightforward. In the US in the late 19th Century, falling transportation costs integrated agriculture into the global economy, but the exporters were politically marginalized; the country elected Republican politicians who implemented high tariffs. This phenomenon occurred at the local as well as the national level. Using voting records and a measure of protectionist sentiment estimated from newspapers, we show that places in the agricultural hinterland that gained transportation connections became more protectionist.
We argue that geographic mobility conditions political responses to economic change. Building on recent developments in urban and international economics, we combine a majoritarian model of policy with a spatial trade model. Internal transportation improvements reduce the cost of accessing the global economy, and cause the exporting sector—agriculture in this period—to expand. Economic development induces both internal and international migration, which alters the composition of the electorate. In the period we study, the migration of laborers into agricultural regions diluted the power of landowners. In our model, the high rate of migration between regions, and the relative sizes and factor intensities of the manufacturing and agricultural sectors, generates the prediction that laborers, regardless of location, should have aligned with the manufacturing sector which supported tariffs. The net result of these changes was an increase in the basis of support for protectionism.
We take the model to county-level data on economic and political outcomes over the period 1880-1900. Our empirical strategy examines how counties responded to distant changes in the transportation network that reduced the cost of accessing the global economy. We find these transportation cost reductions did benefit the agricultural sector—agricultural output and the value of farms both increased—but led to large population increases that reduced the share of farmers in the population. Politically, expanding trade access was associated with a shift away from the Democratic Party—which advocated for low tariffs—and towards protectionism.
Including economic geography in a model of politics generates predictions about what policies agents want and how economic change alters policy outcomes that differ from traditional political economy models. Our theory assumes a high rate of geographic mobility, which was a feature of 19th century America. Modeling and estimating barriers to geographic mobility should provide insights into the relationship between economic and political change across different contexts.
About the Author(s): Kenneth Scheve is the Dean Acheson Professor of Political Science and Global Affairs at Yale University and serves as Dean of Social Science for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Theo Serlin is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Stanford University. Their research “Trains, trade, and transformation: A spatial Rogowski theory of America’s 19th-century protectionism“ is now available in Early View and will appear in a forthcoming issue of the American Journal of Political Science.
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