The Determinants of Individual Trade Policy Preferences: International Survey Evidence

What determines trade policy? While this may seem to be mainly a question for political scientists, it is of increasing concern to international trade theorists, faced with the obvious disjunction between the free trade prescriptions of standard trade models and the protectionist policies pursued by so many governments.1 The intellectual stakes for economists have increased further with the advent of endogenous growth models, which predict that policies can have important, long-run growth effects, as opposed to the fairly trivial deadweight losses implied by static constant returns models. Clearly it is not sufficient to take these policies as exogenous and examine their implications. To understand growth, the theory seems to be telling us, we need to understand why some countries pursue appropriate policies and others inappropriate ones. When faced with such questions, the instinct of economists is to eschew state-centered or cognitive theories and to reach for the rational choice approach: politicians supply policies; voters and interest groups demand them; the institutional environment helps determine the ways in which these demands