340 The Political Economy of Trading States
are simply individual industries requesting, and often receiving, protection for
their particular products. They may be opposed, in that request, by the consumers
of that product if those consumers are sufficiently concentrated (if, for example,
they are industrial consumers who need the product for their production); but
otherwise trade policy will be dominated by special interests seeking protection.
D. The Effect of Institutions
Of course, domestic political institutions also affect the severity of collective action
problems and, through them, trade policy coalitions as well. To illustrate this, we
transform Figure 2 into Figure 3 adding a further distinction between majoritarian
and non-majoritarian institutions. Collective action costs still vary across the
horizontal axis. The vertical axis reflects the individual’s share of a given aggregate
gain, allowing for the effects of both dispersion and nonexcludability, with per
capita benefits being lowest at the top and highest at the bottom (although the
two middle rows on the vertical axis could actually be in either order).
The two polar “ideal types” are still present, in opposite corners. The Rogowski
model is in the upper right: factor mobility means that benefits are relatively
nonexcludable, and thus the numbers (and hence coalitions) of those affected will
be larger; majoritarian institutions mean that large numbers are needed to win,
and costs of collective action must (other things being equal) be small enough to
allow such large organizations to develop. Clearly, as you increase costs of collective
action (moving leftward in the first row of Figure 3 exit once again becomes more
FIGURE 3. Coalition Possibilities: The Effects of Factor Mobility,
Collective Action Costs, and Domestic Political Institutions