Are Nationalist Countries More Protectionist?

We investigate the implications of consumer nationalism for multilateral
trade cooperation. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that countries with
relatively more nationalist consumers can sustain relatively more liberal
trade policies in a repeated-game setting. Moreover, the most cooperative
equilibrium tariff of a sufficiently impatient (patient) country is
decreasing (increasing) in the level of its consumers' nationalism. Thus,
asymmetric consumer nationalism across countries has a less pronounced
anti-cooperation effect, if at all, on the incentives of countries with
relatively more nationalist consumers, rather than vice versa. We take these
predictions to an antidumping–nationalism dataset consisting of 18 antidumping users and find empirical evidence in their support.