Electoral Regime and Trade Policy

This paper studies how trade protection varies with the mechanism used to elect the legislature.  In particular, we study how trade policy differs between countries with legislatures elected by a plurality election rule in single member constituencies and legislatures elected by a proportional, or party-list, rule.  Our results, which are in line with the existing literature, show that countries with list-PR systems tend to have lower trade barriers than countries with majoritarian systems.  Our paper expands on this literature by looking at the difference between countries with open-list rules and countries with closed-list rules.  Our findings indicate that constituency size matters more than party-strength or country size when explaining this result.  We also test the robustness of these results by using recently developed trade restriction indexes as a dependent variable.