Immigrant Out-Groups and Voting against Free Trade

ABSTRACT

Resistance to trade and demands for protectionist policy can derive from social as well as economic factors. A sense of cultural threat surrounding immigrants, especially immigrants visibly from groups that are widely stigmatized among the local population, may potentially stimulate such recoiling from exposure to the world. Voting patterns in the 1889 election in New South Wales, Australia, confirm this hypothesis: in a contest between the Protectionist and Free Trade Parties amidst reaction against the Chinese-Australian population, larger shares of voters preferred the protectionist, trade-restricting side in areas with proportionately larger ethnically Chinese populations than in otherwise similar areas elsewhere.

Acknowledgments

I thank Michael Hiscox for helpful conversations regarding early stages of this project, Cody Schmidt for research assistance, and Gerald Schneider and the anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher's website.

Notes

¹ Notably, this distrust of markets is gendered in many societies, with women more sceptical about international economic openness than men are (Mansfield, Mutz, and Silver 2015).

² “Free Trade” in the party name meant minimizing tariffs beyond what was fiscally necessary, as available technology made tariffs a relatively efficient public-finance mechanism. In some Australian colonies, the Free Trade party was more precisely called the “Revenue Tariff Party,” reflecting this philosophy. Free Traders also accepted retaliatory tariffs (Hogan 2007:314).

³ Turnout rates for contested constituencies in the 1889 election examined below averaged around 57%, assuming that every voter cast votes for all seats in their district.

⁴ Suffrage was not quite universal for adult male citizens. Paupers, those convicted of “infamous offence” without receiving a pardon, and those deemed mentally incompetent did not have the franchise; nor did police or military personnel. Conversely, electors could vote in all constituencies in which they owned sufficient property, even those where they were not resident.

⁵ Census figures from this era mostly exclude the Aboriginal population.

⁶ Protectionist and Free Trade parties appeared in 1887, but the latter was only weakly organized (Loveday and Martin 1966:136–139); Labor emerged as an organized party by 1891’s election. A fuller description of the parties’ platforms in 1889 is available in the Appendix.

⁷ Colonywide, less than 1% of votes were cast informally (that is, for other than official candidates).

⁸ This is not to imply that the Free Trade Party opposed xenophobia: a Free Trade-led ministry in 1887 amended the Influx of Chinese Restriction Act of 1881 to be even more restrictive. This bipartisan opposition to Chinese immigration removes one obvious factor that might otherwise motivate support for one or the other party in locales with many Chinese immigrants.

⁹ Other sheep-per-person breakpoints produce similar results.