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Three Essays on the Impact of International Trade on US Elections

Wijesinghe, Wijayalath Pedige Asanka Sanjeewa
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu160613184589702

Abstract Details

2020, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics.
Brexit and the election win of Donald Trump renewed the academic interests in finding causal factors behind the rise of both left-wing and right-wing populism. The central focus was on economic anxiety, especially the workers' economic grievances resulted from globalization. Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric and protectionist and anti-immigration policy stances qualified him as a right-wing populist, while Bernard (Bernie) Sanders ran a left-wing populist campaign. After the 2016 election, Trump initiated the 2018 trade war, prompting the US's trade partners to retaliate. The retaliation was affecting Republican voters disproportionately. This dissertation examines both right-wing and left-wing populism's economic causes, focusing on import competition. I also examine the electoral cost of protectionism when a trade partner retaliates. In the first essay of this dissertation, I investigate the effect of import competition on Trump’s vote share gain relative to Mitt Romney in 2012. I use the rise of import exposure from 2000-2015 to identify the effect of import shocks on Trump’s gains controlling for overall demand shock to tease out the non-import related economic shocks. I demonstrate that Trump’s political support from import-affected voters was disproportionate across ethnic identities, even within the same income groups. I also demonstrate that the widely discussed “white backlash” in electoral politics, and the import competition effect, were linked together in 2016. In the second essay, I examine whether there was an effect of the Chinese retaliatory soybean tariff on Republican vote share change between the 2016 and 2018 elections for the US House of Representatives. I use soybean tariff exposure of workers controlling for the overall “2018 trade war” effects on wages and import protection to identify the electoral effect of the soybean tariff on Republican vote share change. I show a robust negative effect of the soybean tariff on Republican vote share change. The negative effect is larger in closely competed US counties in which Trump’s vote share was between 40%-50%. Further, I demonstrate that the negative effect concentrates on states which ship soybeans through Pacific Northwest ports. In the third essay, I investigate the economic factors behind the demand for left-wing populism in US politics. Mainly I test whether the economic anxiety thesis, which posits that voters under marginal economic conditions support populists, can explain the electoral support for Bernie Sanders. The results do not conclusively affirm the predictions of the economic inequality thesis. The import competition, income inequality, and unemployment do not have a significant effect. However, import competition and unemployment have a positive and significant effect on Sanders’ vote share in pivot counties, which were won by Obama in 2012 but pivoted to Trump in 2016. The results also show that Sanders commanded support among educated and young Black voters.
Ian Sheldon (Advisor)
Mark Partridge (Committee Member)
Zoë Plakias (Committee Member)
Abdoul Sam (Committee Member)
151 p.
Agricultural Economics; Economics; Political Science
Import Competition, Populism, Trade War 2018, Soyabean Tariff

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Wijesinghe, W. P. A. S. (2020). Three Essays on the Impact of International Trade on US Elections [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu160613184589702

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Wijesinghe, Wijayalath. Three Essays on the Impact of International Trade on US Elections. 2020. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu160613184589702.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Wijesinghe, Wijayalath. "Three Essays on the Impact of International Trade on US Elections." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2020. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu160613184589702

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu160613184589702
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© 2020, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Three Essays on the Impact of International Trade on US Elections by Wijayalath Pedige Asanka Sanjeewa Wijesinghe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.