Producers and the Political Economy of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff

This project builds upon the paper I presented at the 2015 APSA conference under the same name, with the lengthier format (hopefully) allowing for greater development of the theoretical framework, alongside the presentation of several industry cases. In short, even though the seminal explanations for political demands over the tariff focus on either industry-level variations or the notion of fairly uniform lobbying across the economy for protection, significant intra-industry variation in trade-policy demands existed, even though levels of international trade and investment were lower in 1929-1930 than they have been much more recently. At the same time, the patterns in demands for levels of protection or liberalization map neatly onto expectations stemming from modern firm-based models of trade. Congressional responsiveness to these heterogeneous demands varied, tempered by institutional and partisan considerations.