14 1995). The per-unit political cost of increasing farm incomes by raising the RRA thus decreases as the economy becomes less agrarian. In other words, even though the share of farmers in the voting population declines, less opposition to protecting farmers arises when there are fewer of them. Studies by de Gorter, Nielson, and Rausser (1992) and Swinnen (1994) show that under plausible assumptions, the second of those two effects dominates.

Ample evidence supports these theoretical predictions. Moreover, these empirical findings are consistent across (a) empirical, mostly cross-sectional, studies on agricultural protection in the 1980s and 1990s that use reduced-form econometric models; (b) studies using long-term time-series data and econometric analyses; and (c) recent empirical studies using new data sets.<sup>15</sup>

# _3.2.2. Change in Political Institutions_

Several developing countries have experienced democratization over the past three decades. Theoretical formulations have been advanced to explain how democratization will affect public policies.<sup>16</sup> Models based on the median-voter theorem predict that democracies tend to redistribute from the rich to the poor. This is expected in democracies because the distribution of political power (measured by votes) is typically more equal than the distribution of income and wealth (Alesina and Rodrik 1994; McGuire and Olson 1996; Persson and Tabellini 1994). Similarly, democratic regimes could lead to economic-policy reforms if these reforms created more winners than losers (Giavazzi and Tabellini 2005).

The implications for agricultural policies are not straightforward. The very factors that make it difficult for farmers to organize politically (such as their large geographic dispersion) render them potentially very powerful in electoral settings (Bates and Block 2010; Varshney 1995). Since greater insulation of decision-makers implies that they can follow their personal preferences to a greater extent in selecting policies, their ideologies or other types of preferences are a key variable. However, while it is intuitively obvious that when decisionmakers are more insulated from repercussions, they can follow their preferences to a greater extent, this likelihood, by itself, has little predictive power in the absence of specific information about those preferences. Moreover, applying a simple left-/right-wing model to agricultural policy is not straightforward, since higher food costs that result from agricultural protection adversely impact both urban workers (left-wing interests) and industrial capitalists (right-wing interests). Hence, rulers who support either labor or capital should oppose agricultural protection—as they did historically in Europe (Kindleberger 1975; SchonhardtBailey 1998; Findlay and O’Rourke 2007).<sup>17</sup> One implication, however, is that if dictatorial leaders are less constrained in setting policies, all else constant, there should be more variation in observed policy choices under dictatorial regimes than under democracy.<sup>18</sup>

> 15 Type (b) studies include those of K. Anderson, Hayami and Monma (1986); de Gorter, Nielson, and Rausser (1992); Rausser and de Gorter (1989); Gardner (1987); and Swinnen, Banerjee, and de Gorter (2001). Type (c) studies include those by by Gawande and Hoekman (2006; 2010); López and Matschke (2006); Masters and Garcia (2010); Olper and Raimondi (2010); and Olper, Falkowski, and Swinnen (2011).

> 16 Although the importance of governance structures for public policy has long been recognized (for example, in the seminal work by Buchanan and Tullock [1962]), a growing body of economics literature has emerged that analyzes the role of political regimes in policymaking. The political regime determines to what extent the government, once appointed, can rule with ex post control, what type of majorities the government needs in order to ensure its ability to pass legislation, and whether some groups have effective veto power. Various mechanisms can translate the preferences of citizens into controls on the government or majority formations, and, hence, on public policies.

> 17 Dutt and Mitra (2005) empirically find a conditional impact of ideology on trade policy: a more left-wing government (i.e., one that assigns greater weight to the welfare of workers and labor) is more protectionist in the case of capital-abundant countries but less protectionist in the case of capital-scarce countries.

> 18 Olper (2007) does find more variation in policy choices under dictatorial regimes than under democracy.