How Railroads Fueled Protectionism: Trade's Unexpected Political Losers, 1880–1900

🧭 What the paper argues

This study combines a majoritarian political model with a spatial model of trade to develop a Spatial Rogowski account of late 19th-century U.S. protectionism. The core claim is that trade-induced economic change—by drawing new workers to locations closer to world markets—can reduce rather than increase the political power of the factors of production that benefit from trade.

🔎 How railroad expansion is used to test the idea

• County-level changes in transportation costs from railroad expansion between 1880 and 1900 provide quasi-experimental variation.
• The spatial model links falling transport costs to shifts in population, land values, and the local occupational mix.
• A majoritarian political model connects these local economic shifts to changes in vote shares and public sentiment on trade.

📈 What the data show

• Falling transportation costs increased county population and raised farm (land) values.
• The share of residents who were farmers declined even as aggregate farm values rose.
• Counties with reduced transport costs experienced a drop in vote share for the Democratic Party (the party that favored liberal trade policies at the time).
• An original newspaper-based measure indicates higher protectionist sentiment where transport costs fell.

⚖️ Why this matters

The findings demonstrate that expanding trade can reshape not only economic interests but also their geographic distribution, producing political coalitions that favor protection rather than liberalization. This mechanism helps explain rising U.S. protectionism from 1880 to 1900 and highlights how infrastructure-driven market access can have counterintuitive political consequences.