Educating voters for protection

This paper analyzes an agricultural pressure group's publicity campaigns for protection of their industry. If the group knows the positive externalities of domestic production of their goods, they may educate voters on these before an election to induce a favored trade policy. Modeling this situation shows that the expenditure on such campaigns is an increasing convex function of the true externalities. It also shows that, when the farmer population is relatively large, a marginal decline in that population makes the per-capita campaign effort more intense; however, when the farmer population becomes small, a further decline makes the effort less intense.