Partisan Politics and Dynamics in the U.S. Agriculture Protection

Agriculture policy is an important, albeit contentious, political economic issue that has been at the center of trade wars, legal disputes, and a stalling of the current World Trade Organization (WTO) trade round. Unlike trade negotiations in non-agricultural industries, advanced agriculture producers such as members of the European Union and the United States are quite reluctant to liberalize their agriculture sectors. In this articlewe explain the dynamics of agricultural protection in the United States by focusing on the role of partisan politics. We argue that major shifts in the size of U.S. farm support benefits have been shaped by partisan battles over the food stamp program ever since this program's inclusion in the 1971 farm bill. While Democratic Congresses try to increase the size of the food stamp program, Republican Congresses try to shrink it. In the case of divided government, these partisan interventions generate a trade-off between changes in the size of the food stamp program and changes in the size of farm support benefits. This trade-off becomes necessary due to spending constraints and institutional gridlock. We provide empirical evidence in support of this claim from county-level data on farm payments and food stamp benefits and aggregate changes in both programs between 1973 and 2002.