Thrilled my paper with @namalhotra is out at @apsrjournal! Have you always been captivated by the impacts of trade policy on political behavior, applications of causal machine learning, and shocks to soybean prices? Ok well regardless this is still the paper for you! A thread 🧵

Work on distributive politics has shown that incumbents in various settings steer disproportionate economic policy benefits toward “core voters” who are already supportive. But why send $ to people who are going to vote for you anyways, when you could target swing voters instead?

Scholars, politicians, & pundits have suggested that there might not be much of a tradeoff here if sending more $ to supporters increases their political engagement (i.e. greater turnout, contributions). But just how much can incumbents crank up core voter engagement this way?

We combine linked admin data and a salient policy shock to credibly estimate the effects of (better) individual policy outcomes on 2018 turnout and contributions among a core GOP constituency: farmers affected by Pres. Trump’s trade war and his corresponding compensation package.

In 2018, Trump *unilaterally* authorized sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports, triggering retaliatory tariffs that centered on US ag exports. Trump then rushed out the Market Facilitation Program (MFP), which distributed $8.6 billion in compensation aimed at making farmers whole.

To spoil the punchline, better (net) compensation outcomes had large effects on farmers’ propensity to view the MFP as helpful, but didn’t meaningfully boost political engagement. However, that’s not to say the shock didn’t move behavior at all! Read on for details.

Our main research design leverages mismatches between commodity-specific trade war harms and compensation under the MFP, as well as the timing of this joint policy shock: farmers were locked into their 2018 crop portfolios before they saw retaliatory tariffs on the horizon.

The MFP paid fixed per-unit rates on farmers’ production of each of nine ag commodities. But in the Trump admin’s rush to publicize the MFP before looming midterms, they devised payment rates that (idiosyncratically) undercompensated some crops while overcompensating others.

We quantify disparities using 10 ag econ studies of impact of retaliatory tariffs on prices US farmers received. Big contrast in 2 largest crops. Corn MFP rate amounted to tiny fraction of tariff-induced price decline; soybean MFP rate exceeded the tariff-induced price decline.

Farmers noticed the difference! American Soybean Assoc. responded with press release stating “Soy growers are very thankful.” National Corn Growers Assoc. expressed “disappointment that corn farmers… would receive virtually no relief” & called the MFP rate “woefully inadequate”

We estimate the effects of (better) compensation on individual, non-elite farmers’ attitudes using a February 2019 survey of 693 corn and soybean growers. Respondents were asked “How helpful do you think President Trump’s $12 billion trade relief plan will be to your farm?”

We estimate MFP payments and trade war losses from reported production, and thereby construct three measures of (net) policy outcomes: net MFP benefits in $, MFP benefits as a % of tariff-induced losses, and an indicator for whether farm was made whole.

No matter how you measure it, better MFP outcomes seemed to make respondents substantially more likely to view the MFP as helpful. We conclude that variation in farmers’ 2018 policy outcomes (the product of Trump’s heavily publicized, unilateral actions) was very salient.