Roundtable The political benefits of the monoculture Estimating the electoral effect of the market facilitation programme Add to calendar 2023-12-05 14:00 2023-12-05 15:00 Europe/Rome The political benefits of the monoculture Seminar Room 3 Badia Fiesolana YYYY-MM-DD Print Share: Share on Facebook Share on BlueSky Share on X Share on LinkedIn Send by email Scheduled dates Dec 05 2023 14:00 - 15:00 CET Seminar Room 3, Badia Fiesolana Organised by Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies GGP: Global Governance Programme This roundtable discussion will delve into the profound implications of the US Department of Agriculture's Market Facilitation Program (MFP) on county-specific compensation rates, investigating the interplay between political influence and economic need. Many redistributive programs use estimates of need to determine access. These estimates, in turn, depend on a formulaic combination of objective measures and subjective evaluations. Such formulas encourage the distribution of funds on the basis of recipients' positions as economic producers or consumers, rather than by their membership in a political community. These constraints are used to examine the electoral effect of the US Department of Agriculture's Market Facilitation Program (MFP) which provided over $16 billion USD in direct payments, surplus purchasing, and other forms of support to US agricultural producers from 2018 to 2020.According to official statements, these funds were allocated in response to 'objective' econometric estimates of the damage caused by the US-China trade war. County and crop-level administrative shows how the determination of damages for particular crops propagated via the formula into county specific compensation rates based on these counties’ prior planting decisions, identifying a correlation between levels of formula-induced compensation and political party vote shares in the 2020 presidential election.