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The Electoral College system used to elect US presidents has been widely criticized
and many proposals have been put forward to reform it or even abolish it. This paper
shows that this system distorts US trade policies in favor of key industries in swing
states, at the expense of other industries. We focus on antidumping (AD) duties, the
most widely used protectionist barrier. We first show that, during executive first terms,
when the president can be re-elected, the level of AD protection granted to an industry
depends on its importance in swing states. We then exploit exogenous variation in the
identity of swing states across electoral terms to construct an instrument for AD duties
and study their effects along supply chains. We find that politically motivated trade
protection fosters growth in key input industries by decreasing imports and increasing
prices, but hampers growth in downstream industries by raising production costs.
