Abstract This paper empirically examines the influence of political partisanship on antidumping protection, which has become the most frequently used contingent trade remedy in the last 20 years. First, we show that the number of antidumping initiations from the labor intensive industries increases when there is a left-wing government in power. In addition, the evidence on the governments' decision to impose antidumping duty demonstrates that the increase in the leftist orientation of the governments is associated with an increase in the likelihood of an affirmative antidumping outcome from the petitions of labor intensive industries. Although antidumping is an administrative protection which includes a set of necessary procedures and rules to follow, our findings clearly point out the political bias in AD actions in the form of partisan preferences.