POLI 441 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Defensively Equipped Merchant Ship, Autocracy
23 Oct 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
The relevant concept: legislative capture: how easy is it to capture a legislator and make them work for you. Dems are more responsive to the median voter, and so are less protectionist on average, yet this may conceal some heterogeneity. The average voter is not equally well informed about all trade measures. We may thus expect that democracy has contradictory effects on various trade measures: optimal obfuscation: kono claims that voters get informed because the opposition has an incentive to point out the incumbent"s fault. Yet informing the public is costly, rational opposition seeks the most informational band for the buck: it attacks policies whose costs can be explained quickly, easily, and cheaply. As a result, political competition generates biased information: simple policies are more likely to be criticized than complex policies: three levels of complexity: tariffs are straightforward. Ntbs trade remedies, vers, quotas, import licenses etc. are less so.
