Explaining Mass Support for Agricultural strongProtectionismstrong.pdfVIP

Explaining Mass Support for Agricultural Protectionism: Evidence from a Survey Experiment During the Global Recession Megumi Naoi and Ikuo Kume Abstract Why are citizens in advanced industrialized countries willing to accept high prices for agricultural products? Conventional wisdom suggests that agricul- tural interests secure government protection because producers are concentrated and better politically organized than diffused consumers+ Due to its focus on pro- ducer capacity for collective action, however, the literature fails to account for the high levels of mass support for agricultural protectionism in advanced industrial- ized nations+ This article presents new evidence from a survey experiment in Japan conducted during the recent global recession ~December 2008! that accounts for this puzzle+ Using randomly assigned visual stimuli, the experiment activates respon- dents’ identification with either producer or consumer interests and proceeds to ask attitudinal questions regarding food imports+ The results suggest that consumer priming has no reductive or additive effects on the respondents’ support for liberal- izing food imports+ Surprisingly, producer priming increases respondents’ opposi- tion to food import, particularly among those who fear future job insecurity+ We further disentangle the puzzling finding that consumers think like producers on the issue of food import along two mechanisms: “sympathy” for farmers and “projec- tion” of their own job insecurity+ The results lend strong support to the projection hypothesis+ We thank JSPA Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research ~A Globalization and Domestic Politics, 2008–2012! for financial support and Kiichiro Arai, Rieko Kage, Yoshitaka Nishizawa, Masa- hiko Tatebayashi, Masaru Koh