ABSTRACT
The political self-interest model of protection formulated in the previous section focuses on incumbent governments and stresses the policy discretion attendant on incumbency. The model thus offers predictions concerning how an incumbent government might exercise policy discretion. However, although implicit via the political-support motive, the model does not capture the characteristic that policy or policy discretion may be politically contestable. Contestability may occur in the institutional context of direct democracy or representative democracy; under direct democracy, individuals vote directly on an issue, under representative democracy they vote for representatives to whom responsibility is delegated for direct voting on issues. More usually, protectionist decisions are made in the context of representative democracy. A model of endogenous choice of protection under direct democracy is however instructive in indicating the types of outcomes that might arise were the gainers and losers from protection directly able to participate in the determination of trade policy.
