We are pleased to announce that on Thursday, June 30, 2022, the Center for Positive/Empirical Analysis of Political Economy will be inviting Professor Megumi Naoi (University of California, San Diego) to hold a seminar titled “How Embedded Liberalism Failed Stimulus Resentment and the Rise of Protectionism in the United States”.
Event Information
- Speaker: Megumi Naoi (Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego)
- Title: How Embedded Liberalism Failed Stimulus Resentment and the Rise of Protectionism in the United States
- Date and Time: Thursday, June 30, 2022, 13:00-14:30 JST
- Venue: Waseda University, Waseda Campus, Building 3, Room 802 (Both in-person and on Zoom)
- Registration: https://forms.gle/5H8A1j3gCX5WepHd9 (Deadline: Monday, June 27)
- Language: English
Open to members of Waseda University and the general public. Free admission.
Abstract
This study demonstrates that the rise of protectionist sentiment among Republican voters is rooted in stimulus allocation during the Great Recession. I leverage project-level, geo-referenced stimulus allocation data under the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) merged with nationally-representative survey data before, during and after the stimulus deployment. The difference-in-differences estimates suggest that it is not scarcity of government-funded jobs that gave rise to protectionism among Republican voters. Rather, protectionism emerged in response to credit-claiming by the Obama administration that came with more generous allocation of ARRA-funded jobs. I devise two identification strategies, one that leverages variations in states’ compliance to the Federal Highway Administration’s order to install road signs for the ARRA-funded infrastructural projects and a second that utilizes the allocation of ARRA-funded jobs in the renewable energy sector based on solar and wind-generation suitability factors. The results lend support to the causal effect of stimulus allocation on the rise of protectionism during the Great Recession.
Organizers: Tago Atsushi ([email protected]) / Yuriko Takahashi ([email protected])
Sponsored by the Center for Positive/Empirical Analysis of Political Economy.
