The Political Benefits of the Monoculture: Estimating the Electoral Effect of the Market Facilitation Program
Many redistributive programs use estimates of need to determine access. These estimates, in turn, depend on a formulaic combination of objective measures and subjective evaluations. Such formulas encourage the distribution of funds on the basis of recipients positions as economic producers or consumers, rather than by their membership in a political community. We use these constraints to examine the electoral effect of the US Department of Agriculture's Market Facilitation Program (MFP) which provided over $16 billion in direct payments, surplus purchasing, and other forms of support to US agricultural producers from 2018 to 2020. According to official statements, these funds were allocated in response to ``objective” econometric estimates of the damage caused by the US-China trade war. We use county and crop-level administrative data to reconstruct the formula used to significantly expand payments in 2019 and show how the determination of damages for particular crops propagated via the formula into county-specific compensation rates based on these counties' prior planting decisions. We find that counties receiving higher levels of formula-induced compensation, on average, have higher Republican Party presidential vote shares in the 2020 presidential election. Instrumenting for actual MFP disbursements in 2019-2020 using the reconstructed formula, we find that each additional $10 million in MFP payments to a county increased that county's 2020 Trump vote share by about 0.6 percentage points on average.
Robert Gulotty is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His first book project is Governing Trade Beyond Tariffs: The politics of multinational production and its implications for international cooperation. He is also engaged in research on the origins of the international trade regime and the effects of domestic institutions on foreign economic policymaking. This research includes a book project, Opening of the American market: rules, norms and coalitions with Judith Goldstein. Gulotty’s work appears in International Organization, The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism, and The World Trade Report. He has also completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the Stanford Center for International Development and the Department of Political Science.