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.