Agricultural Protection and Electoral Systems : An Empirical Investigation

This paper examines the relationship between countries' electoral systems and their policies of support for the agricultural sector. In particular, we are interested in whether majoritarian systems, which would tend to favor specific geographic districts, are more likely to protect agriculture, than are proportional systems, which would tend to focus more on the well-being of the country as a whole. The broad theoretical framework is take from Grossman and Helpman (2005), who suggest a protectionist bias in majoritarian systems, reflecting a tendency for legislators to redistribute income to industries in their home districts. We find that countries with proportional systems in fact tend to have higher levels of support for agriculture. This result holds after controlling for a number of possible explanatory factors, including a country's resource structure, as well as historical factors which could affect its political system. It is also in contrast to our findings for non-agricultural products, for which countries with majoritarian systems tend to have higher barriers. We attribute this result to the fact that agriculture may be viewed as different from other sectors of the economy - an intrinsic element of a country's national sovereignty and security