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.
This paper investigates whether the arrival of railroads affected the state’s ability to implement national school policy in nineteenth-century Sweden by making school inspectors more able to monitor remote schools. Using fine-grained local education data, the authors compare communities reachable by rail to those that were not and assess differences in school permanence and curricular content. The paper argues for a causal interpretation for at least some outcomes, and presents more tentative evidence on curricular change.