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Liberal perspectives on the global political economy.

• Darel E. Paul Darel E. Paul Department of Political Science, Williams College
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.32
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 11 January 2018

Liberal international political economy (IPE) is the offspring of a marriage between mainstream international economics with its focus on markets and mainstream international relations with its emphasis on the state. While clearly involving the traditional disciplines of economics and political science, liberal scholarship in IPE tends to be housed almost exclusively in the latter. Liberal IPE has always maintained a special relationship with its absentee father economics, looking to it particularly as a source of theoretical and especially methodological inspiration. In its earlier phase, the “American school” of IPE, also known by its practitioners as Open Economy Politics (OEP), was strongly oriented toward studying the societal determinants of state trade policy and indeed continues to expand upon this terrain. OEP has moved into many diverse areas since then. Having roots in both neoclassical economics and realist international relations theory, OEP has a strong tendency to limit its empirical interest to observable behavior, define interest in strictly material terms, and assume the psychology of decision-making to be rational and therefore unproblematic. Unsurprisingly, OEP has little room for ideas as interesting and important objects of study, and in turn some of the early pioneers of the liberal approach in IPE have lamented its becoming “too materialistic.”

• liberal international political economy
• international political economy
• global political economy

Open Economy Politics

• normative liberalism

Introduction

One might be tempted to say that international political economy as an academic discipline, like its forefather political economy, was born liberal. As the Physiocrats, Adam Smith and David Ricardo , are widely considered the founders of both economics (or “political economy” as they all referred to it) and its liberal theoretical manifestation, so, too, can one say that IPE set sail through the pioneering work of liberal scholars. Even before IPE was formally differentiated in the late 1960s and early 1970s, precursors such as Karl Deutsch and Ernst Haas in political science and Richard Cooper and Albert Hirschman in economics (Cohen 2008 :29–30) were integrating the themes of states and markets in a liberal perspective on the changing international order. The work of Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye marks not only the distinctive emergence of IPE in the United States but also the return of liberalism to political economy after having largely abandoned the field to Marxists. Today the existence of a “consensual approach” in IPE endorsed by the American Political Science Association’s section on political economy – now famously dubbed the “American school” of IPE (Cohen 2008 ) – strongly indicates that the field in the US is now dominated by liberals of one form or another. The dominance of liberal perspectives is much less the case outside of the US, although the influence of American scholarship throughout the English-speaking world means rivals are distinctly minority voices.

Moreover, the creation of a “global political economy” in the decades since the 1970s is the fruition of a liberal political project which can be summed up as the promotion of “markets and multilateralism.” This project has, of course, not been without its bumps along the way. That being said, a global political economy organized through institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the Group of 20 strongly indicates the broad successes of a liberal vision of global political-economic order. It should be of little surprise that scholarship from a liberal theoretical perspective has come to dominate the most prominent IPE journals in the United States. Maliniak and Tierney ( 2009 ) show that since the mid-1980s a majority of work published in the twelve leading US political science journals covering IPE has been theoretically rooted in liberalism, while since 2000 some two-thirds of published articles in these journals has been liberal in perspective.

Clearly liberal approaches to describing, explaining and understanding the global political economy are especially prominent, influential, and voluminous. This review first marks out liberalism’s theoretical boundaries. It then moves on to a review of the literatures on domestic–international interactions, domestic political institutions, international institutions, ideas, and finally normative evaluations and prescriptions of the global political-economic order.

The Boundaries of Liberal IPE

Liberal IPE is the offspring of a marriage between mainstream international economics with its focus on markets and mainstream international relations with its emphasis on the state (Cohen 2008 :37). While clearly involving the traditional disciplines of economics and political science, liberal scholarship in IPE tends to be housed almost exclusively in the latter. In fact, in a definitive statement of the liberal approach, Frieden and Martin ( 2002 :118) go so far as to define IPE as a “subdiscipline within political science.” That being said, liberal IPE has always maintained a special relationship with its absentee father economics, looking to it particularly as a source of theoretical and especially methodological inspiration. Gilpin’s ( 1987 :27) definition of the liberal perspective on IPE in fact argues that it is “embodied in the discipline of economics as it has developed in Great Britain, the United States, and Western Europe,” something with which Frieden and Lake ( 1999 :9–10) heartily concur. These leading introductions to the field in fact draw little if any distinction between mainstream economics and liberal IPE. Cohen ( 2008 :37) points out that, if one ignores the continuation of Marxist and neo-Marxist scholarship throughout the twentieth century , the earliest American work in the field was all done by economists such as Albert Hirschman , Jacob Viner , and Charles Kindleberger . Today it is not uncommon to find considerable methodological and theoretical overlap between (American) IPE’s flagship journal International Organization and the field of economics’ Journal of Political Economy .

What unites liberal perspectives not only within but across disciplinary boundaries? First and foremost, liberal perspectives on the global political economy operate from a rationalist epistemology and individualist ontology (Keohane 1988 ). Individual interest is the analytic entry point for liberals, which in IPE is nearly always (with some important exceptions developed below) conceived as material in nature. Rather than begin as do realists with core assumptions concerning actors’ interests, liberals rely strongly upon neoclassical economic theory to deduce them and subject them to empirical test. (Lake 2006 :763–4).

Liberals in IPE are also positivist in their epistemology, emphasizing the discovery of causal laws and the wide use of statistical methodologies to falsify hypotheses derived from theory. Consider for example Keohane and Martin’s ( 1995 :41, 46) argument that, unlike realism, their version of liberalism strives to be a scientific theory generating testable hypotheses and a [progressive] research program. Against another rival to liberalism, Moravcsik ( 1999 :670) critiques constructivism for its lack of “(1) distinctive testable hypotheses, [and] (2) methods to test such hypotheses against alternative theories or a null hypothesis” while holding up rationalist liberal social science as distinctly superior.

Liberals are also pluralist in their relation to political theory. It is not a simplistic pluralism which claims that multiple groups revolve in and out of power through an endless diversity of issues and power resources. Instead it is a theoretical claim that power emanates from a variety of sources which differ across different societies, most importantly through the manner in which institutions aggregate and express interests. Unlike Marxists, liberals reject the existence of a general logic of power (such as through capital) and instead insist that hierarchies can be constructed along any number of lines, from class to ethnicity to knowledge/skill and beyond without bowing to the demands of the means of production.

Finally, a common problematic unites liberal perspectives across many substantive fields of inquiry. While liberalism no longer assumes the existence of a harmony of interests which is bound to triumph over parochialism, it nevertheless remains true that liberal analysis begins from the premise of a universal interest such as a Pareto-efficient trade policy or the public good of a stable open global economy. Liberal IPE scholarship then marshals its resources to answer a basic question informed by liberal economic theory: why does mutually beneficial cooperation (aka “liberalization”) sometimes fail?

For purposes here, the boundaries of liberal IPE include liberal economists interested in the state and power on one side, through the mainstream of the “American school” of IPE across to liberals interested in the ideational dimensions of economic activity. While one often finds sociologists, geographers, and anthropologists as leading thinkers within nonliberal approaches to IPE, liberalism hews closely to a definition of the field as the meeting place of mainstream economics and political science.

This essay organizes liberal perspectives on the global political economy into three broad categories. The first treats the mainstream core of the so-called “American school” of IPE, also known by its practitioners as Open Economy Politics (Lake 2006 , 2009 ). In its earlier phase this literature was strongly oriented toward studying the societal determinants of state trade policy and indeed continues to expand upon this terrain. OEP has moved into many diverse areas since then such as monetary policy and the formation of international economic organizations. The second section reviews liberal work on ideas as explanatory variables in the global political economy. This literature is distinct from OEP by strongly diverging from a strictly materialist notion of interest. Finally, the third section treats explicitly normative work on evaluating and prescribing policy for the global political-economic order to more fully express liberal values and goals.

International Political Economy as a distinct field of academic research was born into a theoretical and methodological cacophony, with long-extant Marxist and neo-Marxist work jockeying for position alongside new studies of “transnational politics” all amidst the general structural transformation of the global international political and political economic order of the 1970s. By the mid-1990s, however, the “vast, open range” of IPE which Susan Strange ( 1984 ) had once so memorably celebrated had been largely plotted and fenced – particularly in the upper echelons of the American academy – through the growth of a broad theoretical “consensus” (Frieden and Martin 2002 :118) keen to set aside paradigmatic debate and pursue Kuhnian normal science (Lake 2009 :49).

This consensus is a deep one, incorporating agreement on “theories, methods, analytical frameworks, and important questions” (Frieden and Martin 2002 :118). In earlier years its practitioners simply referred to it as a “modern political economy” approach (Alt et al. 1996 :689). More recently it has been dubbed “open economy politics” by one of its leading contributors (Lake 2006 ). At OEP’s core are “the assumptions of neoclassical economics and international trade theory,” (Lake 2006 :762), and its empirical questions are strongly oriented toward the analysis of economic openness (or the lack thereof) and its political-economic determinants. One should not forget the older and more eclectic origins of neoliberal institutionalism and its interest in strategic interaction between states, which has also largely been brought under the OEP umbrella. Following standard usage within mainstream American IPE (e.g., Katzenstein, Keohane, and Krasner 1998 :647–9; Frieden and Martin 2002 ), the OEP literature is here divided into two broad categories: the domestic political determinants of states’ international economic policies (with sections on domestic interests and domestic institutions), and strategic international interaction between states.

The Domestic Interest Approach

OEP is, according to its most public proponent David Lake , “a direct descendant of the domestic interest approach” (Lake 2006 :762). Long before political scientists took up interest in the politics of the global economy, economic historians began investigating the domestic political determinants of international trade policy. Two of the most influential were Alexander Gerschenkron ( 1966[1943] ) and Charles Kindleberger ( 1951 ) while several scholars of comparative politics blazed the trail for analysis integrating domestic and international politics within the political science proper, especially Peter Gourevitch ( 1977 ), Peter Katzenstein ( 1978 , 1985 ) and Robert Putnam ( 1988 ).

Two classic works in OEP appeared around the end of the Cold War, one with an empirical focus on trade policy and the other in monetary policy. Rogowski ( 1989 ) deployed the Stolper-Samuelson theorem (itself a derivation from the Heckscher-Ohlin mobile factor endowment model of international trade) to explain both political cleavages and coalitions formed around trade policy and ultimately global patterns of trade liberalization and protection. Frieden ( 1991 ) turned to the Ricardo-Viner specific factor endowment model of trade to explain the distributional effects of and domestic political conflict over financial policies regarding international capital mobility and larger patterns of global financial integration. Each author’s use of pure (liberal) economic theory is especially notable.

The Heckscher-Ohlin and Ricardo-Viner models continue to be analytic workhorses within OEP and characterize a “key divide” (Lake 2006 :763) within the literature, with many studies amassed on both sides. Midford ( 1993 ) expanded on the “extreme parsimony” of Rogowski’s approach by multiplying the number of factors beyond the classic land–labor–capital triad in line with the work of the economist Edward Leamer ( 1984 ). Midford’s eight-factor model showed support for the basic Stolper-Samuelson insights regarding interest group positions on trade policy in the US and Western Europe since World War II. Scheve and Slaughter ( 2001 ) test both the Heckscher-Ohlin and Ricardo-Viner models in an analysis of the trade preferences of individuals as revealed by survey data. While the standard method of determining factor endowments is to measure income, the authors make a significant innovation by incorporating asset (home) prices into their study. They find that factor type and not industry of employment best account for opinions on trade policy, lending support to the HO model. In another variation, Milner and Judkins ( 2004 ) study the trade positions of political parties within the OECD countries. They find that partisanship is highly correlated with trade policy, with left (labor) parties far less supportive of free trade than right (capital) parties. This is supportive of the HO model. At the same time, Milner and Judkins also find that partisanship on trade issues is much less acute in small open economies and decreases over time as globalization has gained traction.

Despite the characterization of a defining HO–RV split in the literature, support for the Ricardo-Viner model is more difficult to find. Irwin ( 1996 ) conceived his study of the 1923 British general election – “an election that hinged on the issue of free trade and protection” – as a direct test of both models and finds that the Ricardo-Viner specific factors model performs much better as an account of actual voting patterns at the county level. Chase ( 2003 ) works from a specific factors model but deduces trade preferences from returns to scale and production sharing rather than simply the lack of capital mobility. His empirical research of US trade politics surrounding the NAFTA negotiations shows a positive relationship between import competition and opposition to free trade as well as significant intra-class cleavages and intra-industry cross-class alliances consistent with the Ricardo-Viner model. Overall Frieden and Martin ( 2002 :127) find the RV approach notably “less developed” in the literature than the more prominent HO model.

Recent work has sought to reconcile the differences between the two models through a temporal analysis focused on changing inter-industry factor mobility over time. Michael Hiscox in particular has contributed much to this literature. Calling both the HO and RV models “extreme” in their assumptions concerning factor mobility ( 2002 :9), Hiscox assembled a large dataset covering six countries over much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to test the relationship between factor mobility and trade politics. He finds that factor mobility is strongly associated with a country’s stage of development, with early industrialization associated with a sharp increase in mobility while it declines in later stages. Political cleavages and trade coalitions, Hiscox finds, do follow the variation in factor mobility over time. Class cleavages predominate in periods of high inter-industry factor mobility while industry cleavages define politics in eras of low mobility, as predicted by both the HO and RV models.

Attempts at reconciliation between HO and RV findings have not gone without criticism. Two recent authors (Ladewig 2006 ; Jeong 2009 ) have continued to note the failure of this literature to produce consistent conclusions, both emphasizing not theoretical but instead methodological causes. According to Ladewig ( 2006 ), factor mobility is virtually impossible to measure directly despite its central empirical importance to research, and different studies have estimated quite different levels of factor mobility for the very same case (the United States since the 1960s). He measures factor mobility with an original dataset based on US House of Representatives districts and finds marked change over time, with low mobility and class cleavages over trade in the 1960s and 1970s yet high mobility with industry cleavages since then. These findings largely support those of Hiscox. Jeong ( 2009 ) introduces a different methodology. Rather than selecting “key” Congressional votes, he incorporates all Congressional votes on trade and uses a multilevel item-response theory model to distill the relative importance of each vote to the question of trade policy. Through this method he comes to a very different conclusion from that of Hiscox, finding that the most recent period in the US ( 1987–2006 ) is characterized by class, not industry-based, conflict over trade. Clearly the literature on the politics of trade will continue to develop.

Although having its roots and much of its continuing research in international trade, the domestic interests approach has expanded analysis into other policy arenas referent to the global political economy. Hiscox ( 2004 ) considers rising levels of global capital mobility and finds their political effects are highly contingent upon the degree of inter-industry factor mobility. While the overall effects of capital mobility should cause firms to have less interest in protectionism (because investment flows act as substitutes for trade flows), there continue to be high levels of manufacturing capital lobbying of Congress for trade protection. Hiscox uses an RV model to explain this anomaly, arguing that industries with immobile capital will actually increase their interest in trade protection under conditions of generally increased capital mobility. Scheve and Slaughter ( 2004 ) also look at the effects of sectoral international capital mobility, with their research focusing on workers’ sense of economic vulnerability in the United Kingdom in the 1990s. Finding “a clear link” between globalization of investment and worker insecurity, the authors’ research supports extant international trade theory on the likely attitudes of losers from trade.

Similar work has been done on many other state policies related to the global political economy. O’Rourke and Sinnott ( 2006 ), for example, find across twenty-four mostly advanced industrialized economies that attitudes toward immigrants are largely a function of skill endowment and the domestic relative abundance of skilled labor per standard trade theory. At the same time, they find that attitudes also reflect “nationalist sentiment” although the statistical correlation is less robust than that of material interest. Milner and Tingley ( 2009 ) use the Heckscher-Ohlin model to explain domestic political support and opposition to foreign aid in the United States since 1979 . Noting that foreign aid is most materially beneficial to both physical and human capital-intensive Congressional districts, the authors find that factor endowments largely explain trade votes with strong distributional consequences. Interestingly, their research also shows no change over time in preferences and thus by extension in the mobility of factors.

Domestic Institutions

Liberal scholars have long recognized that domestic political institutions are not simple conduits for the expression of interests but play a significant intervening role of their own. Thus the OEP literature turned its attention early on to institutions and the manner in which they aggregate interests and delegate decision-making authority. One significant early statement was made by Alt and Gilligan ( 1994 ) who found that a simple argument on political coalition-building produced by mainstream international trade theory was insufficient to account for observed trade policies. The mere existence of interests is not sufficient for determining actual political behavior because interests define only the “benefits” of action – the good to be secured or the ill to be avoided. They do not count the “costs” of collective action, such as the free-rider problem, which are strongly influenced by political institutions. Moreover, Alt and Gilligan found that political institutions themselves define the factor mobility highlighted by economic theory through the manipulation of collective action costs. Another early empirical analysis on cross-national patterns of nontariff barriers (NTBs) by Mansfield and Busch ( 1995 ) found that states with autonomous trade policy institutions well insulated from domestic political pressures for free trade have higher NTBs. Their measure of insulation is a function of the number and size of electoral constituencies, with the hypothesis being a smaller number of large constituencies produces a more insulated state. The authors are keen to point out that a simple “societal model” of trade policy is insufficient and that thorough attention to domestic political institutions is essential.

Many domestic political institutions have been analyzed from the Open Economy Politics perspective. Electoral institutions as key mechanisms of preference aggregation have proven to be of durable theoretical and empirical interest. Rogowski ( 1987 ) offered an early statement, positing a “natural affinity” between economic openness and both a proportional representation electoral system and a large number of constituencies due to their role in diminishing the political influence of protectionist/special interests. Garrett and Lange ( 1995 ) use a simple model to show that all democratic electoral institutions bias policy outcomes in favor of less productive economic sectors, although this tendency can be reduced through systems of national proportional representation and single-member districts which serve to disperse workers in low productivity sectors across electoral jurisdictions. In an empirical study of different constitutional and electoral systems of representation, Milner and Judkins ( 2004 ) found domestic political structures to have a complex and difficult-to-ascertain effect on trade policy. Some institutions – such as federalism, size of the party system and electoral district magnitude – are not significant influences on political party trade positions, while electoral rules, however, do have a significant impact. They find that a proportional representation system in particular causes political parties to be more protectionist than in a plurality system.

Once legislators are elected, the organization of the legislative system is a further important institutional factor influencing state international economic policy. Bailey, Goldstein, and Weingast ( 1997 ) argue that two changes in Congressional voting rules on trade agreements contained within the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 undergird the US path toward free trade. By shifting trade votes from a treaty-like supermajority to a simple majority, free-trade Democrats made international economic agreements possible without any change in underlying interests. Moreover, the authors claim that these institutional changes shifted the political equilibrium of the country toward a more liberal free trade position by aggregating interests in novel ways through presidential powers to bundle foreign and domestic tariff reduction into a single agreement. Hiscox ( 1999 ), however, studies the very same legislation and argues that its durable influence has been due less to the revolutionary nature of institutional change as to the fractured position of the Republican Party on trade after World War II. That is, Hiscox claims shifting interests rather than institutional change in aggregating and expressing stable interests accounts for increasing Congressional support for trade liberalization since 1934 . Martin ( 2000 ) studies the role of democratic national legislatures in accounting for state commitments to international agreements. She engages the question through the analytic lens of “credibility” and its relationship to what she calls the “commitment problem.” Following a rationalist-functionalist approach to international institutions, Martin argues that the precarious nature of state commitment to international agreements is a cardinal barrier to interstate cooperation. This barrier can be overcome and credibility enhanced, however, through executive branch cooperation with their national legislatures. While the participation of legislators makes interstate bargaining more complicated, she finds through studies of both the US Congress and the parliaments of several EU members that state commitment to any bargain reached become much more credible and thus cooperation is promoted.

More recently, liberal perspectives have taken up interest in the broadest effects of society-wide democratization on economic openness. O’Rourke and Taylor ( 2006 ) rely upon the Stolper-Samuelson theorem to theorize that workers in labor-scarce countries will oppose openness whereas those in labor-abundant countries will support it. Their statistical analysis supports the argument that democratization in poor developing countries fosters globalization while in wealthy developed countries it has the opposite effect. The mechanism is not a simple expression of working-class electoral power however, for the authors find that “democracy helped labor get its way on tariff policy, but only if it was supported by capital” ( 2006 :18). Milner and Kubota ( 2005 ) likewise offer an analysis using the Stolper-Samuelson theorem and come to similar conclusions. They find that newly enfranchised groups in developing and democratizing countries – overwhelmingly labor and the poor – are more supportive of globalization (even as economic data showing these groups actually benefit from globalization and survey data showing that they believe themselves to benefit is quite inconclusive). While praising the above mentioned authors, Eichengreen and Leblang ( 2008 :292) find much of the literature on the relationship between democratization and globalization to be “contradictory and inconclusive,” having poorly sorted out the direction of causality and widely neglected to consider the problem of simultaneity. They critique the bulk of this literature for doing little to separate out the trade and financial dimensions of globalization and largely ignoring the history of the global economy prior to World War II. Seeking to address these shortcomings, the authors’ regression results find a positive relationship between democracy and both trade and financial dimensions of globalization, as well as reciprocal effects of globalization on democracy, across the period 1870–2000 .

International Institutions

Liberal IPE’s interest in domestic political institutions is predated by its original focus on international institutions and their role in structuring bargaining and strategic interaction between states. While the domestic–international interaction has recently so dominated the research agenda of OEP that international institutions have been delegated to the status of “the second major building block” (Frieden and Martin 2002 :136; see also the placement of international bargaining after domestic institutions in Lake 2006 ), the work of many of IPE’s pioneers on “transnational relations,” “complex interdependence,” and regimes helped establish the field. Here the emphasis is on relations between states, particularly strategic bargaining and the role of international institutions in molding that interaction. Game theory makes a contribution to liberal perspectives on the global political economy through this doorway as well as more broadly the approach of neoliberal institutionalism. Although Robert Keohane, this literature’s most important contributor, often rejects “liberal” ( 2002a :3) or “neoliberal” ( 2000 :125) as accurate labels for this work, neoliberal institutionalism adopts the same epistemological and ontological foundations as does neoclassical economics, “rational-choice analysis in the utilitarian social contract tradition” (Keohane 1982a :325). In addition, its empirical interests lie in the study of cooperation and institutions in particular as Pareto-superior solutions to market failures (Keohane 1982a :337–9; Lake 2006 :767).

There are many antecedents to liberal IPE work on international institutions. One important contributor is Ernst Haas whose work on the European Economic Union laid the foundation for integration studies. Although denying it was a “theory” at all, Haas pioneered the use of functionalism to account for the growth of international cooperation and organization after World War II. The concept of “spillover” was used to suggest the expansion of union from one issue area to another over time, and interest in functionalism continued well beyond Haas’s own work into the early regimes literature as well as the domestic interests approach. Haas also took up the fundamental liberal “problem of cooperation” well before IPE formally existed, and his answers strongly foreshadowed those given by liberal scholars decades later: domestic interest groups (Haas 1958 ), expectations (Haas 1961 ), social learning (Haas 1964 ), and shared knowledge and beliefs (Haas 1975 , 1990 ).

It can be said that the early 1980s’ literature on international regimes is the origin of a broad disciplinary “taking international institutions seriously” in IPE (Frieden and Martin 2002 :142). In those years, American IPE was yet to be dominated by liberal perspectives and many different scholars contributed to this work. Especially prominent voices included realists such as Stephen Krasner and Robert Gilpin and (future) constructivists like John Ruggie , himself a student of Ernst Haas . Among liberals, however, the leading figure is Robert Keohane who defined the liberal approach to the study of international institutions with his well-theorized rationalist state-centric approach, a sort of “microeconomics of international relations” first introduced in a realist guise by Kenneth Waltz ( 1979 ). Rather than come to realist conclusions regarding the inevitable failures of cooperation and the necessity of violence in underpinning international order, Keohane strove to demonstrate that international institutions – “regimes” – could overcome failures of cooperation. Conceived as analogous to market failure in liberal economics, institutions could overcome suboptimal equilibria and enable agreement by reducing uncertainty, increasing the quality and quantity of information, and reducing transaction costs (Keohane 1982a ). Keohane ( 1984 ) and others (e.g., Stein 1982 ; Axelrod 1984 ; Lipson 1984 ; Snidal 1985a ; Oye 1986 ) also marshaled game theoretic analysis to demonstrate the possibilities for institutions to bring about mutually beneficial cooperation.

The failures of international cooperation and the waning ability of the United States to underwrite a growing open global economy in the 1970s was the primary empirical motivation of this early liberal work on international institutions. The economist Charles Kindleberger ( 1973 ) is generally credited as the founder of hegemonic stability theory avant la lettre in his argument on the causes of the Great Depression. Seeing an open liberal global economy as a public good subject to all the problems of underprovision outlined by liberal economic theory, Kindleberger argued its collapse in the 1930s was due ultimately to the failure of a hegemon to supply it, an unfortunate combination of “British inability and US unwillingness” ( 1973 :289). Building on his earlier work with Joseph Nye on regimes (Keohane and Nye 1977 ), Keohane ( 1980 ) picked up Kindleberger’s insights and developed them into an “issue-specific version of the hegemonic stability thesis” explanation of regime change in trade, money, and oil during the 1970s. Focusing on measures of tangible economic power, Keohane found hegemonic stability theory to have mixed success as an explanatory framework. Strongest in accounting for change in petroleum and money regimes, Keohane ( 1982b ) pursued this argument toward an account of the generalized inflation of the 1970s, finding the collapse of international regimes to be both an effect of declining hegemonic power and a cause of greater uncertainty and uncooperative state policies.

Throughout the 1980s the theme of hegemony animated considerable work from a liberal perspective, and the theory of hegemonic stability emerged as the signature (and as some wags would say, the only) contribution of American international political economy to the social sciences (Cohen 2008 :67). A strand which came to be known as hegemonic “benevolence” particularly appealed to liberal understandings of the global political economy (Snidal 1985b ; Grunberg 1990 ) and depicted British and American hegemony as a virtuous provision of public goods (Kindleberger 1976 , 1981 , 1986 ; Lake 1983 ; James and Lake 1989 ; Keohane 1980 , 1982a , 1984 – although see Snidal 1985b :581 for Keohane’s dissent from inclusion in this camp). Realist scholars of IPE contributed much to the hegemonic stability literature, of course (see especially Gilpin 1975 ; Krasner 1976 ). Liberals diverged strongly from realists, however, in their account of international institutions. Keohane’s ( 1984 ) argument continues to be the definitive statement, asserting that by reducing uncertainty and transaction costs, institutions are perfectly capable of promoting international cooperation on the basis of common interests even “after hegemony.”

By the early 1990s a backlash against hegemonic stability theory began to gain ground (Lake 1993 :460). While the theory continues to occupy a prominent place in American undergraduate classrooms (Paul 2006 :730–1), it has largely “fad[ed] into obscurity” (Cohen 2008 :67) in IPE scholarship. In turn, the literature on regimes shifted toward targeted attention to particular international institutions. A landmark work is Bates’s ( 1997 ) study of the International Coffee Organization. Beginning with a critique of purely interest-based studies which marked the early stages of the domestic interest approach (e.g., Rogowski 1989 ; Frieden 1991 ), Bates argues that global economic processes such as international coffee prices are themselves determined (in part) by state policy and cannot be treated as an exogenous variable. He (1997:161–2) summarizes his argument by stating “The causal path thus runs from state policy to the behavior of international markets and to the welfare of domestic interests – a sequence that deviates strikingly from that traced out by Frieden and Rogowski.”

The European Union is a prominent institutional focus of interest. Burley and Mattli ( 1993 ) offer an early functionalist account of the legal integration of the EU through the European Court of Justice, arguing that the increasing demand for European-wide law from state and nonstate actors has over time created a transnational EU legal sphere autonomous from state policy. Moravcsik ( 1999 ) offered an important theoretical challenge to the rational-functional approach to international institutions in two ways. First, he argues that the transaction costs of international bargaining are not unusually high as supposed by all works rooted in the regimes literature, undermining a key premise of the demand for international institutions. Second, he claims that the transaction costs which do exist are less a function of interstate strategic bargaining environments and more a function of domestic politics. Tsebelis and Garrett ( 2001 ) also criticize functionalist accounts by arguing that the EU’s evolving treaty base and the institutions which come out of it generate the particular equilibrium outcomes observed over time.

The GATT/WTO is also of notable analytic interest. Goldstein, Rivers, and Tomz ( 2007 ) analyze trade data from 1946 to 2004 and find that the GATT/WTO has notably increased trade between not only formal member states but also all those with “institutional standing.” They argue this has happened by creating both rights and obligation for members as well as offering them to nonmembers, usually former colonies of GATT/WTO members, which nevertheless had important trade ties with member states. In addition, due to the ability of members to opt out of various WTO treaties and GATT legal clauses, the radical distinction between formal members and nonmembers with standing is misleading. Statistical analysis of trade data incorporating both de jure and de facto members shows the significant contributions of members to increased trade. Mansfield and Reinhardt ( 2008 ) broaden the scope of material interest to incorporate not simply the volume of income from international trade but its volatility as well. In the first large-scale statistical study of trade volatility over time, they find the GATT/WTO has increased trade between members in part by increasing trade flow stability and consistency in state trade policies. A discordant note, however, is sounded by Busch and Reinhardt ( 2006 ) who offer an analysis of third-party participation in WTO’s dispute resolution system. They find that particular institutional rules of the organization and their interpretation empower third parties to easily join formal trade disputes as a “participatory audience,” serving to lower the prospects for early settlement and raise the bargaining costs for the principal parties. Their argument is ultimately that the WTO actually lowers the efficiency gains of economic cooperation.

Lying beneath most liberal scholarship on international institutions is the argument that institutions increase the credibility of state commitments to liberalizing policies by aiding them in resisting the power of anti-liberal and/or “special” domestic interests. Simmons’s ( 2000 ) work on state commitment to and compliance with Article VIII of the International Monetary Fund’s Articles of Agreement continues to serve as the touchstone study. In this work she finds that stable and clear domestic legal regimes and a strong domestic commitment to the rule of law have an important influence on compliance and the creation of “liberal inertia” behind its continuation. Büthe and Milner ( 2008 ) emphasize the informational effects of GATT/WTO and preferential trade agreements, arguing that state behavior is more closely monitored by all parties because of such institutions and compliance violations are more swiftly and loudly decried and thus punished.

In light of the tendency among liberals to see institutions primarily through a functionalist lens, a warning from Goldstein and Martin ( 2000 ) is significant. They claim that international institutions are not always vehicles for reaching Pareto-optimal outcomes even when they foster precisely the kinds of cooperation praised in liberal theory. For example, increasing transparency and information flows are widely considered to be positive contributions to cooperation made by institutions. However, Goldstein and Martin argue that by increasing the flow of information, domestic interests opposed to trade liberalization can better mobilize around protectionist policy measures. In addition, the increased “bindingness” of international institutions has the effect of dissuading domestic actors from acceding to them in the first place out of fear of lack of flexibility in the face of future unknowns. The ironic outcome is that the expansion of the authority of international institutions designed to create a more liberal international economic order can undermine the political foundations of that very order.

Having roots in both neoclassical economics and realist international relations theory, Open Economy Politics has a strong tendency to limit its empirical interest to observable behavior, define interest in strictly material terms, and assume the psychology of decision-making to be rational and therefore unproblematic. Unsurprisingly, OEP has little room for ideas as interesting and important objects of study, and in turn some of the early pioneers of the liberal approach in IPE have lamented its becoming “too materialistic” (Keohane 2009 :38).

Liberalism more broadly has a long tradition of engaging the political role of ideas, values, and beliefs. Moravcsik ( 1997 ) refers to this body of thought as “ideational liberalism” and appeals to figures such as John Stuart Mill , Guiseppi Mazzini , and Woodrow Wilson as its signal contributors. He goes so far as to incorporate social identity into the liberal project, but is careful to retain a rationalist foundation by taking ideas as extra-political and by narrowing the analytic terrain of ideas to “collective social values or identities concerning the scope and nature of public goods provisions” (Moravcsik 1997 :515) which includes questions concerning the definition of the nation, the legitimacy of political institutions, and the legitimacy of the overarching economic order.

The early regimes literature (which again was not wholly liberal) reserved a place for the role of ideas in the form of “principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge” (Krasner 1982 :185). Some of the early hegemonic stability literature also considered ideas tangentially, which one can see in Keohane’s ( 1984 ) discussion of empathy, moral obligation, and norms of reciprocity as supports for international cooperation after the decline of US hegemony. A more robust liberal engagement with ideas and the locus classicus in liberal IPE is that by Goldstein and Keohane ( 1993a ). Organizing ideas into the typology of “world views,” “principled beliefs,” and “causal beliefs,” Goldstein and Keohane ( 1993b ) advance a rationalist and empiricist understanding of the causal significance of ideas through the metaphor of directing movement along one of many distinct “pathways.” In the context of incomplete information, ideas influence behavior by creating expectations and thus providing “road maps in uncertain environments” (1993b:14). In the presence of multiple Pareto improving equilibria, ideas serve as “focal points and glue” (1993b:17) around which actors build political strategies, expectations, and even trust. Ideas are also institutionalized as rules and norms and thus shape the incentive structure of actors participating in such institutions. They are particularly important in the context of law in which persuasion and justification are important verbal actions.

Of these three causal pathways, the most common and the most consistent with the OEP literature is ideas as focal points. Following the pioneering game theory work of economist Thomas Schelling ( 1960 ), Garrett and Weingast ( 1993 ) and Weingast ( 1995 ) offer an argument for the importance of ideas in solving coordination games. Beginning with the observation that most bargaining situations allow for multiple Pareto-efficient equilibria, Garrett and Weingast ( 1993 ) argue that actual cooperation emerges from a combination of individual interest and collective ideas, the latter being the outcomes of history, culture, and institutional legacy. Their empirical study of the passage of the Single European Act shows that the legislation was made possible through a key ruling by the European Court of Justice and its endorsement by member states, namely that of “mutual recognition” of national treatment policies of foreign goods and services by member states. This became the signature focal point around which European economic law and the single European market have been subsequently built. Weingast ( 1995 ) deploys a theoretical argument with illustrations to suggest how “common conventions” such as the definition of dumping or expectations related to national treatment of goods and services also may serve as focal points for cooperation.

Goldstein ( 1993 ) offers an argument concerning the role of ideas in law in explaining changes in and inconsistencies of US trade policy since the early nineteenth century . Taking stock of shared causal beliefs, such as those concerning the relationship between trade expansion and wages or between government spending and aggregate demand, she shows how ideas have served as “road maps” compensating for incomplete information and leading policy makers toward particular expressions of interest. Moreover, by being “encased in institutions” (Goldstein 1993 :3), she also demonstrates how shared beliefs of the past strongly affect the strategic expression of interest long after their creators and the conditions which gave rise to such ideas have faded from the scene. A literature on reputation has also deployed the road maps’ conception of ideas as means of compensating for incomplete information and enabling international cooperation. Tomz ( 2007 ) provides an important statement in this vein. Noting that foreign investors are unable to completely measure potential risks and returns, he studies several cases over three centuries to demonstrate how beliefs around the likelihood of debt repayment explain both sovereign state willingness to repay and foreign investor willingness to lend. Moreover, these beliefs are mutable, influenced by new information such as regime change in a debtor country or a pattern of changed behavior in a debtor, and thus can be characterized as learning.

Such change in ideas over time has prompted a significant liberal literature on policy diffusion in the global political economy. Social learning is one popular approach, defined as “change in beliefs or change in one’s confidence in existing beliefs, which can result from exposure to new evidence, theories, or behavioral repertories” (Simmons, Dobbin, and Garrett 2006 :795). The global diffusion of liberal ideas and institutions since 1989 has been a particular empirical focus on this literature. Simmons and Elkins ( 2004 ) argue that the diffusion of neoliberal economic policies over the past three decades is a result of two distinct processes. First, diffusion is the result of strategic interaction between states; when one adopts a liberalizing trajectory, these choices create new externalities for other states seeking to attract mobile capital investment and trade opportunities. A second mechanism is policy learning in which states collect information from the track record of foreign models. While incorporating norms and culture, Simmons and Elkins ( 2004 :175–6) are keen to resist a “sociological” approach associated with the work and influence of John W. Meyer , instead claiming that ideas play a role as sources of information and provide a “cognitive short-cut” rather than tap into questions of identity.

In a study of the diffusion of bilateral investment treaties, Elkins, Guzman, and Simmons ( 2006 ) find evidence for the existence of learning in that treaties are more likely to be signed when prior signatories are successfully attracting foreign investment. However, they argue that competitive economic pressures for globally mobile capital have the strongest causal effect. Meseguer ( 2004 ) finds a greater role for social learning in a study of the spread of privatization among OECD and Latin American countries. Testing a “rational model of learning,” she finds that updating information from one’s own and others’ experiences on the relationship between privatization and economic growth, rather than domestic regime type or external pressure, best explains this policy diffusion in the 1980s and 1990s. Lee and Strang ( 2006 ) also study the diffusion of public-sector downsizing among the OECD countries in the 1980s and 1990s but find little support for a simple form of learning in which states adopt “policies that work” as measured by economic trade, trade balances and fiscal health. They do find, however, that strong economic performance among downsizers and weak economic performance among upsizers do seem to be sources of social learning. Interestingly and in a strong finding for the importance of ideas, opposite outcomes (weak economic performance among downsizers and strong economic performance among upsizers) have no effect on learning, leading the authors to conclude that “learning is theory-driven…when theories and evidence come into conflict, theories win” (Lee and Strang 2006 :904).

Liberal work on the importance of ideas in the global political economy has also strongly developed in the study of international law and the interaction between legalization and economic governance. Liberal work on international law is the inheritor of both the regimes literature, housed within the neoliberal institutionalism and tied to its theoretical and empirical mooring of cooperation between states, as well as a more robust form of liberal theory realized in the domestic interest approach (Slaughter Burley 1993 ). In this way it is also at the forefront of the liberal consensus in American IPE. What sets this literature apart from Open Economy Politics, however, is a robust engagement with the role of ideas as well as ethics (discussed below).

Anne-Marie Slaughter has laid an important foundation for this literature in her theorization of international law as an expression of liberal ideas and ideals. Her depiction of the international legal system is one of transnational government networks in a transnational liberal society, constituted primarily by professional associations and their concomitant government bureaucracies with a highly disaggregated vision of the state (Slaughter 1995 , 2004 ). Her theoretical foundation is that of Andrew Moravcsik in which state policy is primarily the outcome of domestic and transnational social relations. Although taking up a decidedly rationalist approach, Slaughter (following Moravcsik) allows for the “pursuit of material and ideal welfare” (Moravcsik 1997 :517). According to Slaughter (and other liberals), the transnational society created among liberal societies is in part built upon shared norms and values including the separation of powers, pluralism, and tolerance. This harkens to Moravcsik’s ( 1997 :527–8) elucidation of “ideational liberalism” which incorporates the perceived legitimacy of others’ domestic political and socioeconomic orders, and it is these commonalities which allow liberal states to cooperate and liberal societies to integrate into a transnational networked space. This ideational dimension of international law is inescapable. Limiting its importance to simply reducing transaction costs or strengthening the credibility of commitments sells short the foundational role of norms in the operation of law. The expanding purview of international law in the global political economy is simultaneously the expansion of common norms regarding both behavior and interpretation of behavior which Abbott and Snidal ( 2000 ) label the “covenant” (as opposed to the “contract”) dimension of law.

In terms of theory, liberal work on international law has developed markedly within both the international relations and international law fields. Keohane ( 2001 :7) for one has held up liberal work on international law as a model for rationalist approaches in IPE precisely because the former “studies rational strategic action in the context of rules and rule making, deeply structured by interests and power but also reflecting the influence of ideas on interests and on how power is exercised.” That being said, the empirical work on the contributions of ideas to global economic governance has been less developed. Exceptions include Abbott and Snidal’s ( 2002 ) analysis of the OECD’s Anti-Bribery Convention, in which they argue that political interest in corruption arose in the US in the 1970s and globally in the 1980s due to “values activism” which was later encoded in OECD regulation primarily through “aggressive values tactics” of the US government and civil society groups such as Transparency International. In particular, the authors appeal to the explanatory power of values at “key turning points” of the political process. However, Abbott and Snidal also note their melding of rationalist and constructivist arguments, suggesting the distinct limitations of a liberal rationalist approach.

It is also important to note the self-imposed limits which liberals place on the role of ideas. Unlike constructivist scholarship, liberals deploy ideas as an additional explanatory variable when material power and individual interest prove insufficient. Thus as Garrett and Weingast ( 1993 :186) state, “the lesser the distributional asymmetries between contending cooperative equilibria and the smaller the disparities in the power resources of actors, the more important will be ideational factors.” In differentiating rationalist liberalism from constructivist approaches, one might take Keohane’s ( 2000 ) aphorism that, from a liberal perspective, social life is “ideas part-way down.” At the same time, Keohane ( 2001 :8) has also suggested that rationality itself is culturally determined, such as when he observes that “interests are incomprehensible without an awareness of the beliefs that lie behind them” or that “the values and beliefs that are dominant within a society provide the foundations for a rational strategy.” The line between rationalist liberalism and constructivism becomes quite muddied here, and Keohane ( 2002b ) strives to maintain the separation by defining rationality as maximization/optimization amid stable preferences.

It is no surprise that some liberals more closely associated with Open Economy Politics have resisted arguments strongly invoking ideas. For example, a study of neoliberal tax policy diffusion by Swank ( 2006 ) finds no support for an argument based on social learning and instead emphasizes the importance of strategic competition to explain the spread of neoliberalism. On the whole, however, the literature on ideas from a rationalist perspective maintains a strong research agenda within liberal approaches to the global political economy.

Normative Liberalism

When liberals launched the marginalist revolution in economics in the late nineteenth century , they expressly sought to establish their field as an exact science, wholly distinct from moral philosophy and history, through ever-increasing reliance on advanced mathematics and a theoretical foundation of self-interest and marginal utility (Alvey 1999 ). Within international relations, liberals have long been sensitive to the charge of utopianism (e.g., Carr 2001[1939] ) and thus especially keen to cast off any association with ideology, all toward establishing a positive version of liberal theory. Thus neoliberal institutionalists, eager to avoid being “tainted by the idealist brush” (Keohane 2000 :7), pioneered a form of liberal IPE dominated by interest, power and strategic interaction. More fully-fledged liberals likewise advanced a form of analysis which they claim is a “nonideological and nonutopian form appropriate to empirical social science” (Moravcsik 1997 :513).

This “nonideological” scientific liberalism has always been motivated by fundamentally normative concerns, however. Open Economy Politics research on the domestic political foundations of state trade policy is rooted in a desire to preserve an open liberal economic order. Positive work demonstrating the political origins of protectionism aids the normative project of combating it. The larger “problem of cooperation” in IPE and IR more generally has always been driven by a normative commitment to a liberal internationalist vision of cooperative global integration. The growth of international institutions and international law, lauded by liberals at least as far back as Immanuel Kant , has more recently pricked an equally long-standing liberal value of popular sovereignty and fear of concentrated power at the global scale, and thus stimulated a normative engagement with the most desirable political foundations for global governance.

Liberal normative literature on the global political economy has no doubt also been spurred on both by newfound opportunities to participate in the making of a post-Cold War world order along liberal lines as well as anti-liberal challenges to it from both the nationalist Right and the socialist Left. It is perhaps easiest to begin with the governance literature reviewed above, which has most clearly moved into an expressly normative concern over the legitimacy of the liberal global order. In a presidential address to the American Political Science Association, Keohane ( 2001 ) boldly combined positive and normative analysis in what he identified as a distinctly liberal “governance dilemma” which sees powerful institutions as both necessary for peaceful human cooperation and flourishing and as potentially dangerous suppressors of liberty. In light of this dilemma, the task of political science for Keohane ( 2001 :1) becomes “help[ing] actors in global society design and maintain institutions that would make possible the good life for our descendants.” This is not a thin conception of the “good life” either, simply establishing fair procedures but remaining agnostic on their outcomes. Keohane in particular has gone on to work which wades deep into normative political theory, advising policy makers on how to “limit and constrain the potential for abuse of power” (Grant and Keohane 2005 ), to “articulate a global public standard for the normative legitimacy of global governance institutions” (Buchanan and Keohane 2006 ), and even to “build, piece by piece, a pluralistic accountability system in world politics” constituted primarily by NGOs and NGO networks (Keohane 2006 ).

Many other liberals have embraced the normative vision of a legitimate and accountable networked global political-economic order. The most definitive statement comes from Slaughter ( 2004 ) who outlines a set of “foundational norms” for the future establishment of a “just world order” based upon the liberal normative principles of “global deliberative equality, legitimate difference, and positive comity…checks and balances and subsidiarity” ( 2004 :29). The result would be a “networked world order…as inclusive, tolerant, respectful, and decentralized as possible” ( 2004 :217). Even normally temperamentally conservative economists have jumped into the act. In one of his most explicitly normative arguments, Rodrik ( 2000 ) identifies a “political trilemma of the world economy” in which policy makers faced with trying to maintain globally integrated national economies, nation-states, and mass politics are allowed only two of these three. He is bold enough to not only predict a future of “global federalism” in which the nation-state is thrown onto the ash heap of history, but admit to possible bias since it is the “option that I personally like best” ( 2000 :184).

Other liberals, particularly economists, have tackled normative questions over material welfare and matters of global distributive justice. Rodrik (esp. 1997 , 2007 ) has pursued a long-standing critical engagement with both mainstream empirical work on economic development as well as a normative project of bolstering economic growth and political autonomy in the developing world and preserving an open liberal economic order. Stiglitz and Charlton ( 2005 ) have written prescriptions for making a global liberal trading order compatible with economic development in the global South, a regime “based on principles of economic analysis and social justice – not on economic power and special interests” ( 2005 :5). Stiglitz ( 2006 ) has expanded this work to incorporate normative prescriptions for the entire global economy including trade, intellectual property rights, natural resources, the environment, governing multinational corporations, debt relief, finance, and accountability, ever keen to demonstrate that “the problem is not with globalization itself but in the way globalization has been managed” ( 2005 :4). Sachs ( 2005 , 2008 ) has been the most prominent among recent liberal economists writing in a normative vein, offering elaborate economic and political plans for the “end of poverty” and the establishment of an “enlightened globalization” in order to realize the Enlightenment commitment to “the idea that social progress should be universal” ( 2005 :350). Echoing the most lofty discourse of any liberal cosmopolitan, Sachs ( 2008 ) emphasizes the need for a “new ethic of global cooperation” ( 2008 :339) which will see his project through, institutionalized through the United Nations, networked NGOs and a global e-Parliament debating global legislation. The primary obstacle to this new world order is a “collapse of faith,” “cynical disbelief” ( 2008 :295) and “a global chorus of pessimists” motivated by “a state of mind, not a view based on facts” ( 2008 :313). One can perhaps be excused when expressing doubts that liberal perspectives on the global political economy have truly dispatched with utopianism.

Keohane, Macedo, and Moravcsik ( 2009 ) provide a useful summary and defense of the normative liberal impulses behind positive liberal political economy. The most obvious is the differentiation between “special interests” and the “public good” (or more concretely, “public goods”) so essential to liberal economic theory. Others include individual rights defended through nonmajoritarian political institutions, “sound collective deliberation” defined as high levels of information and rational discourse, and “inclusive” government (largely justified by its contribution to individual rights and public goods). The authors’ steadfast commitment to liberal principles and attenuated commitment to democratic ones is especially interesting and strongly recalls the fears of Zakaria ( 2003 ) on the growth of “illiberal democracy” around the world.

This normative political economy literature points up a broader point of unity among all liberals, those pursuing what they perceive to be strictly positive work and those pursuing both positive and normative work simultaneously. Both positive and normative liberal thought rests upon what Slaughter, Tulumello, and Wood ( 1998 ) call the “law/power dichotomy,” a sharp distinction between a world of anarchy and unchecked force on the one hand and an alternative social order organized through cooperative rule-based institutions on the other. One can of course go all the way back to Kant and find this liberal distinction between “mad freedom” and “rational freedom” and trace it up to the present day in Robert Keohane’s ( 2001 :1) juxtaposition of “cooperation” with “unregulated conflict” or Lisa Martin’s ( 2007 :114) contradistinction between “consistently enforced rules” and “power politics.” International, or perhaps now transnational, cooperation becomes both the empirical point of reference as well as the cardinal normative good to be fostered.

Directions for Future Research

Open Economy Politics has established a strong research program and its adherents have blazed a number of trails for future research. Lake ( 2006 ) suggests three issue areas for integration into the OEP literature: endogenous state formation, global governance, and the political economy of conflict. Elsewhere Lake ( 2008 ) suggests OEP turn its attentions to marked power differences between states in the global political economy. Being rooted in liberal economic theory, OEP presumes the existence of small open economies and thus a global competitive market, with actors unable to affect prices. Lake suggests turning analytic attention to the rise of China and treating both international prices and factor endowments as endogenous rather than exogenous variables as excellent frontiers for research.

Compared to the study of trade policy, finance has long taken a back seat among liberal scholars of IPE. Thus the study of domestic-international linkages relating to financial policy and international financial institutions is a fertile field for research. Broz and Frieden ( 2006 ) suggest more scholarship on the politics of exchange rates, while Lohmann ( 2006 ) urges the resurrection of research on all monetary aspects of “macro political economy,” particularly central banking and financial volatility.

The global economic crisis which first emerged at the end of 2007 offers particularly rich soil for research into the world order which liberals (for the most part) have constructed since the end of the Cold War. While the 1990s were the heyday of liberal globalization and the 2000s saw a significant flowering of the networked global political economy, the early 2010s promise to put the cosmopolitan liberal political project to its most serious test since the 1930s.

Finally, calls for “bridge building” between liberalism and rival theoretical perspectives offer interesting and challenging avenues for future research. Rationality is a mental process, yet as Mercer ( 2005 ) demonstrates, rationalist scholarship carries on as if “rationality is free of psychology” and thus comfortably ignores processes of cognition which are central to its methodology and epistemology. Elms ( 2006 ) suggests introducing methods from behavioral economics and shows how one might adjust already extant IPE research to more seriously incorporate cognition. Keohane ( 1984 ) even made a theoretical gesture toward integrating emotion into IPE which could generate interesting new insights on the sources of international and transnational cooperation.

Something similar might be done regarding the relationship between liberalism and more social and social constructivist approaches to the global political economy. With “modernist” constructivism already blurring the lines between rationalism and constructivism writ large, particularly interesting work is increasingly being done on the borders of the two approaches. Cohen ( 2008 :171) in particular suggests much could be gained by contemporary liberal IPE scholars breaking free from “the reductionist methodology of neoclassical economics.” One should not expect, nor even hope for, a merger, but a more fruitful dialog across theoretical gaps in the field can open new and interesting windows on a once again rapidly changing world.

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Links to Digital Materials

Centre for International Governance Innovation. At www.cigionline.org/ , accessed August 27, 2009. CIGI is an international think tank located in Canada whose mission is “to address international governance challenges through world-class research”. It supports such research through conferences, workshops, publications, public events and technology. Its website contains a wealth of information on policy communities involved in global governance issues.

The Economist . At www.economist.com/ , accessed August 27, 2009. This weekly news magazine from London is the gold standard of global economic reporting and opinion. It is also the signature public voice of classical liberalism after the manner of John Stuart Mill. The magazine’s editorial board is a staunch defender of globalization in all its forms – trade, finance, migration, and culture.

The Free Rider Problem. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. At plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-rider/ accessed August 27, 2009. Collective action is the signature concern of liberal IPE, and the free rider problem is among its most significant impediments. This site offers a long discussion of the issue from a liberal perspective, giving a history of both positive and normative thinking on the matter as well as explanations of the prisoner’s dilemma, public goods, and Anthony Downs’s classic paradox of voting.

Neoclassical schools, 1871–today. History of Economic Thought Website. At homepage.newschool.edu/het/thought.htm#neoclassical , accessed August 27, 2009. This site includes detailed descriptions of the work of the most prominent economists of the neoclassical school of economics, including bibliographies and links to many writings. The list of economists includes the founders of the marginalist revolution, the Chicago School, the New Classicals, the Austrian School, and the authors of the neoclassical synthesis among others. Liberal IPE takes most of its theoretical guidance from such economists.

Dani Rodrik’s weblog. At rodrik.typepad.com/ , accessed August 27, 2009. Dani Rodrik is among the most prominent liberal economists writing in IPE today, and is especially known for his accessible work directed toward the broader public. This is Rodrik’s weblog which is subtitled “unconventional thoughts on economic development and globalization”. He has been blogging since April 2007 and posts around 8–10 times a month.

Anne-Marie Slaughter. Big Think. At bigthink.com/annemarieslaughter , accessed August 27, 2009. Before she became Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department in 2009, Anne-Marie Slaughter was one of the leading contemporary liberal theorists of international law. This site is billed as Slaughter’s blog and contains over a dozen video postings of her speaking on contemporary global political issues, from international networks to “America’s enemies.” It continues to receive new additions since her appointment to the State Department.

Theory Talk #9: Robert Keohane. Theory Talks. At www.theory-talks.org/2008/05/theorytalk-9.html , accessed August 27, 2009. Theory Talks describes itself as “an interactive forum for discussion of debates in International Relations with an emphasis on the underlying theoretical issues.” This is a printed version of a 2008 Theory Talks interview with Robert Keohane, the most influential liberal scholar in the field of IPE, with additional links to Keohane’s faculty profile, a 2004 video interview, and several of his recent articles. The larger site has as of this writing 33 such interviews with leading international relations scholars from both North America and Europe.

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International Political Economy

• Yuhki Tajima , Field Chair
• Mitch Kaneda , Curricular Dean

Please see the SFS Bulletin for all major requirements .

The International Political Economy (IPEC) major investigates the rich intersection between economics and politics in the global environment. It typically goes beyond the constituent disciplines by combining traditional economic concerns about efficiency with traditional political concerns regarding distributional issues and legitimacy in market and non-market environments. The resulting combination of insights provides a means of better understanding complex interactions at the local, national and international levels.

The special character of international political economy derives in part from the methodological and substantive overlaps between the traditional disciplines of economics and political science. Methodologically, political economy combines formal modeling, comparative methods, and statistical techniques to analyze and evaluate competing theories of economic and political phenomena. In addition to using methods standard in the constituent disciplines, political economy has pioneered in developing new tools for the study of collective action in the presence of conflicting private interests.

Substantively, International Political Economy analyzes how international and domestic political factors interact with economic factors to determine outcomes in a wide variety of areas, e.g., legislation, elections, government regulation, and policy formation in response to international phenomena; unilateral and multilateral activities involving international trade, finance, aid, and natural resources; local and international growth, development, and income distribution; and the interaction between business, governments, and diplomacy. The scope of inquiry ranges from mature capitalist countries, to developing economies to nations making transitions to capitalist systems. In all cases, the focus is on issues that cannot be properly understood without insights gained from both international economics and international politics.

Goals of the Major

The International Political Economy (IPEC) major is designed to provide students with the multi-disciplinary, methodologically rigorous tools needed to understand and analyze the interaction between political and economic forces around the world. These tools, as well as the substantive knowledge gained, will serve students who pursue graduate work, or careers in the private, public, or non-profit sector, international or non-governmental organizations. The IPEC major derives in part from the overlap between economics and political science, and the substantive knowledge gained by students in the IPEC major will partly reflect this. But the IPEC major also goes beyond these constituent disciplines and will provide students with knowledge of a variety of areas, including but not limited to the problems of globalization, the processes of economic development and reform, and the role of political power in economic policymaking.

Students will acquire both analytical tools and substantive expertise through unique core courses as well as through foundational courses from International Economics and International Politics on economic theory, econometrics, and international political economy. Students will also gain further expertise on specific areas by specializing in subsequent courses. All students, finally, will apply analytical tools to a particular topic of interest by writing a senior thesis.

Objectives of the Major

Substantively, International Political Economy analyzes how international and domestic political factors interact with economic factors to determine outcomes in a wide variety of areas. The scope of inquiry ranges from mature capitalist countries, to developing economies to nations making transitions to capitalist systems. In all cases, the focus is on issues that cannot be properly understood without insights gained from both international economics and international politics. This requires an understanding of the methods and principal issues animating the areas in which these fields intersect.

To do this, students will learn:

• Quantitative and qualitative methods to make causal inferences regarding political-economic phenomena
• The ways in which states and state-institutions help or hinder economic prosperity How collective action in the presence of conflicting private interests can shape legislation, elections, and policy
• The nature of unilateral and multilateral factors shaping international trade, finance, and aid.
• Original research and writing that identifies a puzzle, derives testable hypotheses, selects appropriate methodologies, gathers empirical evidence, and offers conclusions.

Writing in the Major

Students majoring International Political Economy learn how to apply analytical tools to a particular topic of interest by writing a senior thesis and how to produce original research and writing that identifies a puzzle, derives testable hypotheses, selects appropriate methodologies, gathers empirical evidence, and offers conclusions.

IPEC majors are introduced to analytical tools and theories through the following required classes:

• ECON 101 Intermediate Microeconomics
• ECON 121 Economic Statistics
• ECON 122 Intro to Econometrics
• GOVT 261 International Political Economy
• PECO 201 Analytical Tools for Political Economy

Students are exposed to research topics and research methods through reading of academic papers and conducting their own research projects presented in courses such as:

• IPEC 312 Research Topics in International Political Economy
• IPEC 328 Political Economy of Inequality and Distribution
• IPEC 332 Political Economy of Institutions and Development
• IPEC 250 IPE Quantitative Research Lab
• INAF 383 Applied Econometrics for Development: Stata Practicum
• ECON 484 Political Economy of Trade Policy

Finally, students are trained to produce original research and writing conducted in the mandatory capstone course:

• IPEC 401 Senior Capstone Seminar

Honors in the Major

Students can earn Honors in the IPEC Major by submitting a letter of intent during the junior year, writing an honors quality thesis based on original research during the senior year, earning an A grade in the Senior Seminar, earning a major GPA of at least 3.67, and earning a cumulative GPA of at least 3.5.

IPEC Requirements

IPEC majors must satisfy the following requirements.

All students must demonstrate proficiency in mathematics by one of three means: Passing MATH-035 Calculus I with a score of 4 or higher in AP Calculus, or passing the Math Department Calculus I waiver test.

The Mathematics Department waiver test is an option suitable for students who studied calculus in high school but did not have the opportunity to take the AP exam. It is administered during the New Student Orientation period just before the beginning of the fall semester. Note that calculus is a prerequisite for Intermediate Microeconomics and Economic Statistics.

It is recommended that students satisfy the calculus requirement before the beginning of the sophomore year.

Requirements for the Class of 2022 and Beyond

• Prerequisite: Calculus I or equivalent
• Corequisite: GOVT-040 Comparative Political Systems
• Corequisite: GOVT-060 International Relations
• Corequisite: ECON-243 International Trade
• Corequisite: ECON-244 International Finance
• ECON-101 Intermediate Microeconomics
• ECON-121 Economic Statistics
• ECON-122 Introduction to Econometrics
• GOVT-261 International Political Economy, GOVT-262 International Organization, GOVT-267 International Trade Law, or GOVT-268 Political Economy of Development
• PECO-201 Analytical Tools for Political Economy or ECON-459 Game Theory
• Two IPEC Core or Supporting courses, at least one of which must be IPEC Core
• IPEC-401 Senior Thesis Seminar*

*Students who are not pursuing Honors in the IPEC major will be able to choose between the following: Option I: Taking IPEC 401 and writing a thesis in it. Option II: Taking an additional IPEC Core category course to substitute IPEC 401, and submitting a research paper written in a 300 or 400-level course that can count for the major. Notes: (a) IPEC 401 is required for all students seeking Honors in the IPEC major and remains open to all students in the major. (b) For Option II, you cannot double-count a single IPEC Core course to satisfy both the capstone requirement and an IPEC Core requirement. (c) For Option II, the research paper is to be submitted electronically to Dean Kaneda before the last day of the semester’s classes (not the last day of exams) if you are graduating in May or December, and before the last day of the second summer session’s classes if you are graduating in August. (d) For Option II, the research paper can be from any of the 300 or 400-level courses that are attributed as IPEC Core or IPEC Supporting category courses. Not all IPEC Core/Supporting courses have a research paper requirement. (e) For Option II, the research paper is expected to analyze a theoretical or empirical puzzle relevant to IPEC. It must be a completed and conclusive paper, and not a research proposal. The student must have earned a passing grade for the course in which the research paper was written.

Requirements Up to and Including the Class of 2021

The following 4 preparatory courses. These courses should be taken before senior year.

• ECON 122 Introduction to Econometrics

ECON 101 should be completed during sophomore year since it is a pre-requisite for PECO 201. ECON 121 should be completed by the first semester of junior year since it is a pre-requisite for ECON 122. GOVT 261 targets sophomores and juniors. It is offered once a year, in either of the semesters. Students going abroad in the junior year should look into taking GOVT 261 in the sophomore year, as long as GOVT 060 International Relations has been completed.

Two Interdisciplinary Courses in Political Economy.

• PECO 201 Analytical Tools for Political Economy (offered every fall)
• IPEC 401 Senior Seminar in Political Economy (offered every spring)*

PECO 201 is ideally completed during junior year. IPEC 401 must be completed at Georgetown.

• Four courses from the IPEC Core and IPEC Supporting course lists, at least two of which must be IPEC Core courses.

*Students who are not pursuing Honors in the IPEC major will be able to choose between the following: Option I: Taking IPEC 401 and writing a thesis in it. Option II: Taking an additional IPEC Core category course to substitute IPEC 401, and submitting a research paper written in a 300 or 400-level course that can count for the major. Notes: (a) IPEC 401 is required for all students seeking Honors in the IPEC major and remains open to all students in the major. (b) For Option II, you cannot double-count a single IPEC Core course to satisfy both the capstone requirement and an IPEC Core requirement. (c) For Option II, the research paper is to be submitted electronically to Dean Kaneda before the last day of the semester’s classes (not the last day of exams) if you are graduating in May or December, and before the last day of the second summer session’s classes if you are graduating in August. (d) For Option II, the research paper can be from any of the 300 or 400-level courses that are attributed as IPEC Core or IPEC Supporting category courses. Not all IPEC Core/Supporting courses have a research paper requirement. (e) For Option II, the research paper is expected to analyze a theoretical or empirical puzzle relevant to IPEC. It must be a completed and conclusive paper and not a research proposal. The student must have earned a passing grade for the course in which the research paper was written.

SEQUENCING IPEC majors urged to have fulfilled the Calculus I prerequisite (course, advanced credits, or waiver test) before the sophomore year. ECON 101 Intermediate Microeconomics and ECON 121 Economic Statistics are best taken during the sophomore year. You can consult the curricular dean for individualized planning.

QUANTITATIVE METHODS Analyzing data, whether to test hypotheses or to summarize trends, is an important part of studying international political economy. As a result, all majors are required to take statistics and econometrics and are encouraged to do so as early as possible, preferably no later than the end of their junior year. (Statistics and econometrics are essential in writing the senior thesis in IPEC-401.)

December Graduates: Some students who have accumulated sufficient credits elect to graduate early. To do so, students need to plan ahead, especially if honors in IPEC is to be pursued. All IPEC Honors candidates must take the senior seminar, IPEC-401, which is offered only in the spring semester.

IPEC Course Lists:

The list of IPEC core and IPEC core and supporting courses can be searched for in the Registrar’s Schedule of Classes for each semester by selecting all for “Subject” and selecting SFS/IPEC Core Courses or SFS/IPEC Supporting Courses for “Attribute Type.”

Study Abroad

A substantial fraction of students choose to spend part or all of the junior year abroad. Although studying abroad has clear benefits, it also has costs. A successful balancing of these costs and benefits requires advanced planning. PECO-201 is offered in the fall semester. As this course builds a foundation that will be used in later courses, it is best to take it before the senior year. Students spending one semester abroad should consider the spring rather than the fall semester. Those spending a year abroad should consult with the field chair and the curricular dean.

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This thesis contains three independent research papers on political economy of development with a unified focus on leadership and decision makings within real world environments. The first chapter deals with country-cross experience using authoritarian turnovers, defined as a transition within nondemocratic regimes, as natural experiments. The final two chapters consists of China-based papers within contemporary historical context, i.e., the period since China’s reform and opening in the late 70s. The second chapter investigates the wealth creation and accumulating class, pinned down by global billionaires, people who have estimated wealth exceeding 1 billion U.S dollars based on Forbes’ database. The final chapter considers a critical theoretical along with a political struggle between two competing views on the interplay between market economy and socialism in the mid 80s. Using Deng Xiaoping’s southern talk in 1992 as an ending mark of that grand debate over the future institutional course of China, the third chapter seeks to provide a descriptive study on the effect of political shock on the social composition of super rich class in China, utilizing a database compiled from Chinese Academy of Social Science (CASS). Chapter 1, Does Authoritarian Turnover Deliver, using authoritarian turnovers (ATs) as natural experiments, investigates the institutional transition effects from one nondemocratic regimes to another. I ask the following question: does authoritarian turnover produce on average positive growth effects? Using this exercise, I attempt to provide another test on the nexus between democratization and growth. An emerging idea from this research is that authoritarian turnover is as likely to happen as a transition into democracy. To determine this, a new panel dataset from authoritarian regimes 7 between 1950 and 2014 was constructed. My estimates suggest that those authoritarian turnovers have an adverse small average growth effect. This implies that by failing to take into account authoritarian turnovers, democratization literature might have underestimated the effect of transition into democracy. From a decomposition analysis, it is determined that transitions into party regimes can once in a while deliver better outcomes than transitions into other authoritarian systems. In general, however, the transition to party regimes on average cannot deliver a better growth outcome than democratization. Chapter 2, Becoming Global Billionaires from Mainland China: Theory and Evidence, studies the the set of billionaires from mainland China, discusses how their social origins affect their financing patterns. Guided by a proposed conceptual framework relating socio-political backgrounds of the billionaire entrepreneurs to their observable financing decisions, I show, under conditions of an open economy, grassroots billionaire entrepreneurs (e.g., Jack Ma) could attenuate political economy as well as financial frictions via capital injections from foreign venture capitalists. Building a unique database, I find, using a human equation, that (i) the politically unconnected billionaire entrepreneurs financed by foreign venture capitalists are more likely to float their companies outside mainland China (mainly in Hong Kong and the U.S), use offshore financing vehicles, and enter into innovative sectors; and (ii) the politically connected global billionaire entrepreneurs, however, are strongly associated with a record of state-owned enterprise (SOE) restructuring. Chapter 3, Serving the People or the People’s Note: On the Political Economy of Talent Allocation, discusses the welfare-improving impact of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Talks, through better allocation of talents. An efficient allocation of talents through occupational choice is central to modern economic growth. Removal of developmental barriers unfavorable to entrepreneurship might be a plausible channel for China’s superb economic performance. Using a newly compiled data on China’s Super Rich Persons (CSRP), the regression kink (RK) design reports supportive evidence on the politically induced structural change in the social compositions of entrepreneurs using as an event shock from Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Talks: consistent with pro8 market talent allocation framework (i) the share of super-rich entrepreneur having state sector experience and party membership declines; (ii) the effects on the attributes of the parental father of the entrepreneurs are rather limited. In short, the three chapters as a whole contribute to a study of political economy of development using real world experiences. At the core of each of the chapter, the central theme of the paper is unified under the interactions between decision makings of leaders, whether they are political or business leaders, and institutional environments. In chapter 1, the average effect of authoritarian turnovers, which by definition are associated with replacement of leaders, could be interpreted as selection effects of leaders in that setting. In chapter 2, the minting of Chinese billionaires is more or less made possible by the institutional innovations offered by an open economy in which offshore vehicles and other sets of financial innovations are available. In chapter 3, the shaping of a wealth creation class could be attributable to a political resolution of competing ideals and plans in a unique historical setting.

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Institutions and International Political Economy: Realist Readings of International Regimes

• First Online: 01 November 2018

Cite this chapter

• Ilias Kouskouvelis 4 &
• Kyriakos Mikelis 4  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth ((DIG))

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The chapter addresses the role of institutions in respect to international political economy and particularly to the evolution of international cooperation, at both the economic and political sectors. The respective literature, within the field of international relations (IR), is indeed sizeable and multi-faceted. In this regard, the concept of international regimes has long drawn notable attention, also allowing for theoretical debates over the potential and dynamics of cooperation. In fact, the concept has proved useful even for realism, that is, an IR perspective, often criticized for being associated with conservative, static and conflict-prone analysis. Evidently, the engagement of realism with the concept has enabled the former to account for cooperative dynamics and mechanisms in the international system. Thus, the chapter at first offers brief typologies for both the creation and the maintenance of international regimes, and it subsequently offers a critical appraisal of the multiple understanding of institutions and particularly regimes within the realist perspective, pinpointing the strengths and weaknesses as well as the challenges of realist readings on institutions and the relevance of the latter within international political economy and politics.

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Kouskouvelis, I., Mikelis, K. (2018). Institutions and International Political Economy: Realist Readings of International Regimes. In: Vliamos, S., Zouboulakis, M. (eds) Institutionalist Perspectives on Development. Palgrave Studies in Democracy, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship for Growth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98494-0_11

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International Political Economy

Goals of the major.

The International Political Economy (IPEC) major provides students with the multi-disciplinary and methodologically rigorous tools needed to understand and analyze the interaction between political and economic forces around the world. These tools, as well as the substantive knowledge gained, serve students who pursue graduate work, careers in the private, public, or non-profit sector, or careers in international or non-governmental organizations. The IPEC major derives in part from the overlap between economics and political science. In addition, the IPEC major goes beyond these constituent disciplines and provides students with knowledge of a variety of areas including, but not limited to, the problems of globalization, the processes of economic development and reform, and the role of political power in economic policymaking.

Students acquire both analytical tools and substantive expertise through unique core courses as well as through foundational courses in international economics, international politics, economic theory, statistics, and econometrics. Students also gain expertise in specific areas by further specializing in subsequent courses. All students apply theoretical and statistical tools to a topic of interest by writing a research paper or a senior thesis.

Substantively, International Political Economy analyzes how international and domestic political factors interact with economic factors to determine outcomes in a wide variety of areas.  The scope of inquiry spans across nation states and regions with different political systems and in different stages of economic development.  The focus is on issues that cannot be properly understood without insights gained from both international economics and international politics.  This requires an understanding of the methods and principal issues animating the areas in which these fields intersect.

To do this, students learn:

• Quantitative and qualitative methods to make causal inferences regarding political-economic phenomena
• The ways in which states and state-institutions help or hinder economic prosperity
• How collective action in the presence of conflicting private interests can shape legislation, elections, and policy
• The nature of unilateral and multilateral factors shaping international trade, finance, and aid
• Original research and writing that identifies a puzzle, derives testable hypotheses, selects appropriate methodologies, gathers empirical evidence, and offers conclusions

Requirements for the Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service in International Political Economy

Courses in the SFS Core requirement serve as foundational requisites of this major.

• Prerequisite: Calculus I or equivalent
• Corequisite: GOVT-1400 Comparative Political Systems
• Corequisite: GOVT-1600 International Relations
• Corequisite: ECON-2543/243 International Trade
• Corequisite: ECON-2544/244 International Finance
• ECON-2101/101 Intermediate Microeconomics
• ECON-2110/121 Economic Statistics
• ECON-3001/122 Introduction to Econometrics
• GOVT-2601 International Political Economy, GOVT-2602 International Organization, GOVT-2607 International Trade Law, or GOVT-2608 Political Economy of Development
• PECO-3010/201 Analytical Tools for Political Economy or ECON-4059/459 Game Theory
• Two IPEC Core or Supporting courses, at least one of which must be IPEC Core
• IPEC-4980/401 Senior Capstone Seminar, or if not pursuing honors, a research paper and an additional IPEC Core course

Writing in the Major

All students majoring in IPEC must write a senior thesis or a research paper based on original research.  Students write the thesis in the Senior Capstone Seminar (IPEC-4980/401) and thus pursue their individual research projects as part of a cohort of scholars studying international political economy. If honors is not pursued, the research paper can be written in one of the 3000 or 4000-level major courses.

Honors in International Political Economy

Students can earn Honors in the IPEC Major by submitting a letter of intent during the junior year, writing a thesis based on original research during the senior year, the thesis judged as honors quality, earning an A grade in IPEC-4980/401 Senior Capstone Seminar, earning a major GPA of at least 3.67, and earning a cumulative GPA of at least 3.50.

More information about the major and its faculty may be found on the BSFS website.

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International Political Economy

Explore this course:.

Applications for 2024 entry are now open. Apply now or register your interest to hear about postgraduate study and events at the University of Sheffield.

Department of Politics and International Relations, Faculty of Social Sciences

Course description

We can't begin to understand how political decisions are made without examining the economic context that shapes them, yet we also cannot grasp why the economy functions in the way it does without understanding the profoundly political decisions that determine who gets what, when, why and how.

This course will expand your understanding of contemporary capitalism by looking at how the global political economy is constituted, the ways in which it functions to benefit particular groups, countries and people, and how it is evolving.

You'll be taught by expert academics who are pushing the boundaries of international political economy. You will learn how to analyse the operation of contemporary capitalism, who wins and loses from it, and whether we can achieve more equal, just and sustainable societies. Throughout your studies you will address questions such as:

• Who are the key actors in international political economy and how do they interact with our local, national and international political institutions to produce particular economic outcomes?
• How do we generate decent living standards in a world of rapid technological change? 
• Why does the global economy seem to be producing ever-greater concentrations of wealth and poverty? 
• What explains the rapid development of the so-called ‘rising powers’ and is theirs a model that can be emulated? 
• Which level of analysis - the family, the village, the region, the nation, the global - should we examine when seeking to make sense of the global political economy? 
• Is it possible for our economies to keep growing in a world of looming environmental breakdown? 
• Will globalisation continue over the coming decades, or do current conflicts mean we are now entering an era of deglobalisation? 
• Whose theories and concepts can help us make better sense of a rapidly changing 21st Century context that appears to be replete with economic crises?

The MA International Political Economy degree attracts a hugely diverse student body. Some may have already studied politics and international relations previously, whereas others may have little academic experience in the subject but wish to better understand the evolution of the global political economy in an era marked by significant economic upheaval.

Students come from all sorts of different backgrounds, and this really is evident in the classroom. You will be encouraged to share your knowledge and experience, and the varied perspectives help to produce fruitful and lively discussions in seminars.

An open day gives you the best opportunity to hear first-hand from our current students and staff about our courses.

You may also be able to pre-book a department visit as part of a campus tour. Open days and campus tours

• 1 year full-time
• 2 years part-time

You'll be taught by experts working at the very cutting-edge of the field, who will bring their novel and important insights to bear on classroom discussion.

The real-world puzzles and problems that you deal with in class are the same problems that real-world policymakers are grappling with themselves. 

The majority of this course will be taught through seminars. Seminars offer an engaging and dynamic learning experience, where you are encouraged to investigate an issue from multiple perspectives, and then develop arguments for which there is no 'correct' answer, just different answers with different implications.

You will then debate these answers with your fellow students and academic tutors, as well as invited guest expert policymakers, to develop your own perspectives on crucial issues of public policy and governance that are grounded in solid evidence and reasoning.

Students will be assessed through a variety of assignments, typically including essays and portfolios. You will also complete a dissertation based on a topic of your choice, which enables you to put all of the skills and knowledge you have gained throughout your degree into practice. You will undertake research-led inquiry on the chosen topic, and a dedicated dissertation supervisor will support you, offering you one-to-one guidance throughout the dissertation process.

Your career

Politics postgraduate students go on to work in a variety of exciting roles across the globe.

The MA International Political Economy degree will prepare you especially well for working in jobs that value an outward-looking global perspective that grasps how political and economic relationships are intertwined.

The skills developed on the degree lend themselves particularly well to careers that require advanced analysis skills. This can be in government and the wider public sector, as well as lobbying organisations, charities and private companies, as well as more overtly financial jobs in banking and insurance.

You will cover a variety of topics on the degree, from central banking to financial sector reform, development, poverty and inequality to trade policy; this means that you can shape your degree in such a way that it also prepares you for working professionally on that issue, too.

You will develop a host of transferable skills that will appeal to a range of employers. Recent graduates have secured employment with: 

• Bank of England
• UK Government
• International Development Research Network
• British Red Cross
• Department for Business Energy and Industrial Strategy
• Ministry of Justice
• Chulalongkorn University

(Source: Graduate Outcomes, 2019-20, 2020-21, Postgraduate, Department of Politics and International Relations)

Department of Politics and International Relations

We're proud to be one of the UK's leading departments for politics and international relations.

We are a research-intensive department, and research lies at the heart of everything we do. The quality of our research environment is rated top nationally, which means that our department is a vibrant, progressive and supportive place to undertake your research.

We offer an inclusive and collegial culture. You'll work closely with leading academic experts whose research is making a significant and global impression, and with students from across the world who share your commitment to the subject.

Everyone is encouraged to work together, hold lively debates and benefit from each other's different perspectives and backgrounds. When you join us, we will ensure that you have many opportunities to immerse yourself in all aspects of academic life in the department. 

Our postgraduate degrees are distinct and reflect our core strengths. Our staff have a wide range of research interests and expertise, which are brought together around four research themes:

• International politics
• Political economy
• Environmental politics
• Political theory
• Governance and public policy

Our community of researchers is diverse and draws upon a wide range of methodologies and approaches to the discipline.

Student profiles

I chose Sheffield for its great reputation for diversity and education

International student Christine reflects on the reasons why she chose to study at Sheffield and why she wished to continue her education and pursue a masters degree in Global Political Economy.

Entry requirements

Minimum 2:1 undergraduate honours degree in a relevant social science, arts and humanities subject or other related subject.

If you're an international student who does not meet the entry requirements for this course, you have the opportunity to apply for a pre-masters programme in Business, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Sheffield International College . This course is designed to develop your English language and academic skills. Upon successful completion, you can progress to degree level study at the University of Sheffield.

If you have any questions about entry requirements, please contact the department .

Fees and funding

You can apply for postgraduate study using our Postgraduate Online Application Form. It's a quick and easy process.

This course has a date of equal consideration  of 31 October 2023. This date has now passed, but we are currently still welcoming applications.

More information

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Dissertations

The dv410 dissertation is a major component of the msc programme and an important part of the learning and development process involved in postgraduate education., research design and dissertation in international development.

The DV410 dissertation is a major component of the MSc programme and an important part of the learning and development process involved in postgraduate education. The objective of DV410  is to provide students with an overview of the resources available to them to research and write a 10,000 dissertation that is topical, original, scholarly, and substantial. DV410 will provide curated dissertation pathways through LSE LIFE and Methods courses, information sessions, ID-specific disciplinary teaching, topical seminars and dissertation worksops in ST. With this in mind, students will be able to design their own training pathway and set their own learning objectives in relation to their specific needs for their dissertation. From the Autumn Term (AT) through to Summer Term (ST), students will discuss and develop their ideas in consultation with their mentor or other members of the ID department staff and have access to a range of learning resources (via DV410 Moodle page) to support and develop their individual projects from within the department and across the LSE. 

Prizewinning dissertations

The archive of prizewinning dissertations showcases the best MSc dissertations from previous years. These offer a useful guide to current students on how to prepare and write a high calibre dissertation.

2022-OW (PDF) The Politics of Political Conditionality: How theEU Is Failing the Western Balkans Pim W.R.Oudejans Joint winner of Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Development Management 

2022-GN (PDF) An Empirical Study of the Impact of Kenya’sFree Secondary Education Policy on Women’sEducation Nora Geiszl Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Development Management 

2022-JC  (PDF) Giving with one hand, taking with the other:the contradictory political economy of socialgrants in South Africa Jack Calland Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Development Studies

2022-GL (PDF) State Versus Market: The Case of Tobacco Consumption in Eastern European and Former Soviet Transition Economies Letizia Gazzaniga Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Health and International Development

2022-ER (PDF) Reproductive injustice across forced migration trajectories: Evidence from female asylum-seekers fleeing Central America’s Northern Triangle Emily Rice Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Health and International Development

2022-LICB  (PDF) The effects of Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) on child nutrition following an adverseweather shock: the case of Indonesia Liliana Itamar Carillo Barba Winner Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Health and International Development 2022-SC (PDF) Fiscal Responses to Conditional Debt Relief:the impact of multilateral debt cancellation on taxation patterns Sara Cucaro  Joint winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2022-RM  (PDF) Navigating humanitarian space(s) to provideprotection and assistance to internally displacedpersons: applying the concept of ahumanitarian ‘micro-space’ to the caseof Rukban in Syria Miranda Russell  Joint winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2021-CC  (PDF) International Remittances and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Investigating Resilient Remittance Flows from Italy during 2020 Carla Curreli Joint winner of Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance and Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Development Management 

2021-NB  (PDF) Reluctant respondents: Early settlement by developing countries during WTO disputes Nicholas Baxtar Joint winner of Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Development Management (Specialism: Applied Development)

2021-CD  (PDF) One Belt, Many Roads? A Comparison of Power Dynamics in Chinese Infrastructure Financing of Kenya and Angola Conor Dunwoody  Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Development Studies

2021-NN  (PDF) Tool for peace or tool for power? Interrogating Turkish ‘water diplomacy’ in the case of Northern Cyprus Nina Newhouse Winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Development Studies

2021-CW  (PDF) Exploring Legal Aid Provision for LGBTIQ+Asylum Seekers in the American Southwest from 2012-2021 Claire Wever Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2021-BP  (PDF) Instrumentalising Threat; An Expansion of Biopolitical Control Over Exiles in Calais During the COVID-19 Pandemic Bethany Plant Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2021-HS  (PDF) A New “Green Grab”? A Multi-Scalar Analysis of Exclusion in the Lake Turkana Wind Power (LTWP) Project, Kenya Helen Sticklet Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2021-GM  (PDF) Fuelling policy: The Role of Public Health Policy-Support Tools in Reducing Household Air Pollution as a Risk-Factor for Non-Communicable Diseases in LMICs Georgina Morris Winner of Prize for Best Dissertation MSc Health and International Development 

2021-LC  (PDF) How do women garment workers employ practices of everyday resistance to challenge the patriarchal gender order of Sri Lankan society? Lois Cooper Joint winner of Prize for Best Overall Performance MSc Health and International Development 

2020-LK  (PDF) Can international remittances mitigate negative effects of economic shocks on education? – The case of Nigeria Lara Kasperkovitz Best Overall Performance Best Dissertation Prize International Development and Humanitarian Emergengies 

“Fallen through the Cracks” The Network for Childhood Pneumonia and Challenges in Global Health Governance  Eva Sigel Best Overall Performance Health and International Development 

2020-AB  (PDF) Fighting the ‘Forgotten’ Disease: LiST-Based Analysis of Pneumonia Prevention Interventions to Reduce Under-Five Mortality in High-Burden Countries Alexandra Bland Best Dissertation Prize  Health and International Development   

2020-TP  (PDF) Techno-optimism and misalignment: Investigating national policy discourses on the impact of ICT in educational settings in Sub-Saharan Africa Tao Platt Best Overall Performance Development Studies 

2020-HS  (PDF)  “We want land, all the rest is humbug”: land inheritance reform and intrahousehold dynamics in India Holly Scott Best Dissertation Prize Development Studies   

2020-PE  (PDF)  Decent Work for All? Waste Pickers’ Collective Action Frames after Formalisation in Bogotá, Colombia  Philip Edge Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management

2020-LC  (PDF)  Variation in Bilateral Investment Treaties: What Leads to More ‘Flexibility for Development’? Lindsey Cox Best Dissertation Prize Development Management

2019-GR (PDF) Political Economy of Industrial Policy: Analysinglongitudinal and crossnationalvariations in industrial policy in Brazil andArgentina Grace Reeve Best Overall Performance Development Studies 

2019-MM (PDF) The Securitisation of Development Projects: The Indian State’s Response to the Maoist Insurgency Monica Moses Best Dissertation Prize Development Studies 

2019-KM (PDF) At the End of Emergency: An Exploration of Factors Influencing Decision-making Surrounding Medical Humanitarian Exit Kaitlyn Macneil Best Overall Performance Prize Health and International Development

2019-KA (PDF) The Haitian Nutritional Paradox: Driving factors of the Double Burden of Malnutrition Khandys Agnant Best Dissertation Prize Health and International Development   

2019-NL (PDF) Women in the Rwandan Parliament: Exploring Descriptive and Substantive Representation Nicole London Best Dissertation Prize Development Management 

2019-CB (PDF) Post-conflict reintegration: the long-termeffects of abduction and displacement on theAcholi population of northern Uganda Charlotte Brown Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management 

2019-NLeo (PDF) Making Fashion Sense: Can InternationalLabour Standards Improve Accountabilityin Globalised Fast Fashion? Nicole Leo Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management 

2019-AS (PDF) Who Controls Whom? Evaluating theinvolvement of Development FinanceInstitutions (DFIs) in Build Own-Operate (BOO)Energy Projects in relation to Market Structures& Accountability Chains: The case of theBujagali Hydropower Project (BHPP) in Uganda Aya Salah Mostafa Ali Best Dissertation Prize African Development 

2019-NG (PDF) Addressing barriers to treatment-seekingbehaviour during the Ebola outbreak in SierraLeone: An International Response Perspective Natasha Glendening India Best Overall Performance Prize African Development 

2019-SYJ (PDF) The Traditional Global Care Chain and the Global Refugee Care Chain: A Comparative Analysis Sana Yasmine Johnson Best Dissertation Prize Best Overall Performance Prize International Development and Humanitarian Emergengies 

2018-JR (PDF) Nudging, Teaching, or Coercing?: A Review of Conditionality Compliance Mechanisms on School Attendance Under Conditional Cash Transfer Programs Jonathan Rothwell Best Dissertation Prize African Development 

2018-LD (PDF) A Feminist Perspective On Burundi's Land Reform Ladd Serwat Best Overall Performance African Development 

2018-KL (PDF) Decentralisation: Road to Development or Bridge to Nowhere? Estimating the Effect of Devolution on Infrastructure Spending in Kenya Kurtis Lockhart  Best Dissertation Prize and Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management 

2018-OS (PDF) From Accountability to Quality: Evaluating the Role of the State in Monitoring Low-Cost Private Schools in Uganda and Kenya Oceane Suquet Mayling Birney Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management 

2018-LN (PDF) Water to War: An Analysis of Drought, Water Scarcity and Social Mobilization in Syria Lian Najjar Best Dissertation Prize International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2018-IS  (PDF) “As devastating as any war”?: Discursive trends and policy-making in aid to Central America’s Northern Triangle Isabella Shraiman  Best Overall Performance  International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies

2017-AR (PDF) Humanitarian Reform and the Localisation Agenda:Insights from Social Movement and Organisational Theory Alice Robinson Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

2017-ACY (PDF) The Hidden Costs of a SuccessfulDevelopmental State:Prosperity and Paucity in Singapore Agnes Chew Yunquian Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Managament 

2017-HK  (PDF) Premature Deindustrialization and Stalled Development, the Fate of Countries Failing Structural Transformation? Helen Kirsch Winner of the Best Dissertation in Programme Development Studies

2017-HZ  (PDF) ‘Bare Sexuality’ and its Effects onUnderstanding and Responding to IntimatePartner Sexual Violence in Goma, DemocraticRepublic of the Congo (DRC) Heather Zimmerman Winner of the Best Dissertation in Programme International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

2017-KT  (PDF) Is Good Governance a Magic Bullet?Examining Good Governance Programmes in Myanmar Khine Thu Winner of the Best Dissertation in Programme Development Managament 

2017-NL  (PDF) Persistent Patronage? The DownstreamElectoral Effects of Administrative Unit Creationin Uganda Nicholas Lyon  Winner of the Best Dissertation in Programme African Development 

2016-MV  (PDF) Contract farming under competition: exploring the drivers of side selling among sugarcane farmers in Mumias             Milou Vanmulken  Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation                                                      Dev elopment Management                

2016-JS  (PDF) Resource Wealth and Democracy: Challenging the  Assumptions of the Redistributive Model              Janosz Schäfer  Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Studies                

2016-LK   (PDF) Shiny Happy People: A study of the effects income relative to a reference group exerts on life satisfaction             Lajos Kossuth Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance                                     Development Studies  

2015-MP (PDF) "Corruption by design" and the management of infrastructure in Brazil: Reflections on the Programa de Aceleração ao Crescimento - PAC.             Maria da Graça Ferraz de Almeida Prado                                                          Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation                                          Development Managment                                                                                  

2015-IE (PDF) Breaking Out Of the Middle-Income Trap: Assessing the Role of Structural Transformation.                                                                               Ipek Ergin                                                                                                   Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

2015-AML (PDF) Labour Migration, Social Movements and Regional Integration: A Comparative Study of the Role of Labour Movements in the Social Transformation of the Economic Community of West African States and the Southern African Development Community.             Anne Marie Engtoft Larsen                                                                                Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation                                   Development Management

2015-MM (PDF) Who Bears the Burden of Bribery? Evidence from Public Service Delivery in Kenya                     Michael Mbate                                                                                                   Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation and Best Overall Performance Development Management

2015-KK (PDF) Export Processing Zones as Productive Policy: Enclave Promotion or Developmental Asset? The Case of Ghana. Kilian Koffi Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation African Development

2015-GM (PDF) Forgive and Forget? Reconciliation and Memory in Post-Biafra Nigeria. Gemma Mehmed Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

2015-AS (PDF) From Sinners to Saviours: How Non-State Armed Groups use service delivery to achieve domestic legitimacy. Anthony Sequeira Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation and Best Overall Performance International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

2014-NS (PDF) Anti-Corruption Agencies: Why Do Some Succeed and Most Fail? A Quantitative Political Settlement Analysis. Nicolai Schulz Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

2014-MP (PDF) International Capital Flows and Sudden Stops: a global or a domestic issue? Momchil Petkov Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

2014-TC (PDF) Democracy to Decline: do democratic changes jeopardize economic growth? Thomas Coleman Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

2014-AK (PDF) Intercultural Bilingual Education: the role of participation in improving the quality of education among indigenous communities in Chiapas, Mexico. Anni Kasari Excellent Dissertation and Best Overall Performance Development Management

2014-EL (PDF) Treaty Shopping in International Investment Arbitration: how often has it occurred and how has it been perceived by tribunals? Eunjung Lee Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Management

2013-SB (PDF) Refining Oil - A Way Out of the Resource Curse? Simon Baur Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

2013-NI (PDF) The Rise of ‘Murky Protectionism’: Changing Patterns of Trade-Related Industrial Policies in Developing Countries: A case study of Indonesia. Nicholas Intscher Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation and Best Overall Performance Development Studies

2013-JF (PDF) Why Settle for Less? An Analysis of Settlement in WTO Disputes. Jillian Feirson Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

2013-LH (PDF) Corporate Social Responsibility in Mining: The effects of external pressures and corporate leadership. Leah Henderson Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

2013-BM (PDF) Estimating incumbency advantages in African politics: Regression discontinuity evidence from Zambian parliamentary and local government elections. Bobbie Macdonald Excellent Dissertation and Best Overall Performance Development Studies

WP145 (PDF) Is History Repeating Itself? A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Representation of Women in Climate Change Campaigns. Catherine Flanagan Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP144 (PDF) Disentangling the fall of a 'Dominant-Hegemonic Party Rule'. The case of Paraguay and its transition to a competitive electoral democracy. Dominica Zavala Zubizarreta Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP143 (PDF) Enabling Productive Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries: Critical issues in policy design. Noor Iqbal Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP142 (PDF) Beyond 'fear of death': Strategies of coping with violence and insecurity - A case study of villages in Afghanistan. Angela Jorns Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

WP141 (PDF) What accounts for opposition party strength? Exploring party-society linkages in Zambia and Ghana. Anna Katharina Wolkenhauer Joint Winner, Best Overall Performance Development Studies

WP140 (PDF) Between Fear and Compassion: How Refugee Concerns Shape Responses to Humanitarian Emergencies - The case of Germany and Kosovo. Sebastian Sahla Joint Winner, Best Overall Performance Development Management

WP139 (PDF) Worlds Apart? Health-seeking behaviour and strategic healthcare planning in Sierra Leone. Thea Tomison Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP138 (PDF) War by Other Means? An Analysis of the Contested Terrain of Transitional Justice Under the 'Victor's Peace' in Sri Lanka. Richard Gowing Best Overall Performance and Best Dissertation International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

WP137 (PDF) Social Welfare Policy - a Panacea for Peace? A Political Economy Analysis of the Role of Social Welfare Policy in Nepal's Conflict and Peace-building Process. Annie Julia Raavad Joint Winner, Best Overall Performance and Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP136 (PDF) Women and the Soft Sell: The Importance of Gender in Health Product Purchasing Decisions. Adam Alagiah Joint Winner, Best Overall Performance Development Management

WP135 (PDF) Human vs. State Security: How can Security Sector Reforms contribute to State-Building? The case of the Afghan Police Reform. Florian Weigand Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP134 (PDF) Evaluating the Impact of Decentralisation on Educational Outcomes: The Peruvian Case. Siegrid Holler-Neyra Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Management

WP133 (PDF) Democracy and Public Good Provision: A Study of Spending Patterns in Health and Rural Development in Selected Indian States. Sreelakshmi Ramachandran Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP132 (PDF) Intellectual Property Rights and Technology Transfer to Developing Countries: a Reassessment of the Current Debate Marco Valenza Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP131 (PDF) Traditional or Transformational Development? A critical assessment of the potential contribution of resilience to water services in post-conflict Sub-Saharan Africa. Christopher Martin Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation International Development and Humanitarian Emergencies (IDHE)

WP128  (PDF) The demographic dividend in India: Gift or curse? A State level analysis on differeing age structure and its implications for India's economic growth prospects. Vasundhra Thakurd Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP127  (PDF) When Passion Dries Out, Reason Takes Control: A Temporal Study of Rebels' Motivation in Fighting Civil Wars. Thomas Tranekaer Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP126  (PDF) Micro-credit - More Lifebuoy than Ladder? Understanding the role of micro-credit in coping with risk in the context of the Andhra Pradesh crisis. Anita Kumar Best Overall Performance and Best Dissertation Development Management

WP124 (PDF) Welfare Policies in Latin America: the transformation of workers into poor people. Anna Popova Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP123  (PDF) How Wide a Net? Targeting Volume and Composition in Capital Inflow Controls. Lucas Issacharoff Best Overall Performance and Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP117 (PDF) Shadow Education: Quantitative and Qualitative analysis of the impact of the educational reform (implementation of centralized standardised testing). Nataliya Borodchuk Best Overall Performance and Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP115 (PDF) Can School Decentralization Improve Learning? Autonomy, participation and student achievement in rural Pakistan. Anila Channa Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP114 (PDF) Good Estimation or Good Luck? Growth Accelerations revisited. Guo Xu Best Overall Performance and Best Dissertation Development Studies

WP113 (PDF) Furthering Financial Literacy: Experimental evidence from a financial literacy program for Microfinance Clients in Bhopal, India. Anna Custers Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP112 (PDF) Consumption, Development and the Private Sector: A critical analysis of base of the pyramid (BoP) ventures. David Jackman Winner of the Prize for Best Disseration Development Management

WP106 (PDF) Reading Tea Leaves: The Impacy of Mainstreaming Fair Trade. Lindsey Bornhofft Moore Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP104 (PDF) Institutions Collide: A Study of "Caste-Based" Collective Criminality and Female Infanticide in India, 1789-1871. Maria Brun Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Studies

WP102 (PDF) Democratic Pragmatism or Green Radicalism? A critical review of the relationship between Free, Prior and Informed Consent and Policymaking for Mining. Abbi Buxton Joint Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP100 (PDF) Market-Led Agrarian Reform: A Beneficiary perspective of Cédula da Terra. Veronika Penciakova Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Studies

WP98 (PDF) No Business like Slum Business? The Political Economy of the Continued Existence of Slums: A case study of Nairobi. Florence Dafe Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

WP97 (PDF) Power and Choice in International Trade: How power imbalances constrain the South's choices on free trade agreements, with a case study of Uruguay. Lily Ryan-Collins Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Dissertation Development Management

WP96 (PDF) Health Worker Motivation and the Role of Performance Based Finance Systems Africa: A Qualitative Study on Health Worker Motivation and the Rwandan Performance Based finance initiative in District Hospitals. Friederike Paul Joint Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Dissertation Development Management

WP95 (PDF) Crisis in the Countryside: Farmer Suicides and the Political Economy of Agrarian Distress in India. Bala Posani Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Management

WP94 (PDF) From Rebels to Politicians. Explaining Rebel-to Party Transformations after Civil War: The case of Nepal. Dominik Klapdor Winner of the Prize for Excellent Dissertation Development Management

WP92 (PDF) Guarding the State or Protecting the Economy? The Economic factors of Pakistan's Military coups. Amina Ibrahim Winner of the Prize for Best Dissertation Development Studies

WP91 (PDF) Man is the remedy of man: Constructions of Masculinity and Health-Related Behaviours among Young men in Dakar, Senegal. Sarah Helen Mathewson Winner of the Prize for Best Overall Performance Development Studies

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Political Economics

The political economics field is an interdisciplinary field focusing on the collective, political activity of individuals and organizations.

The PhD Program in political economics prepares students for research and teaching positions by providing rigorous training in theoretical and empirical techniques. The intellectual foundation for the program is positive political economy, which includes formal models of rational choice, collective action, political institutions, political competition, and behavioral political economy. Development and extensions of theories are often combined with empirical analysis, including the identification of causal effects.

Students become involved in research early in the program. They begin their own research during the first year and are required to write research papers during the summers following the first and second years. The program is flexible and allows ample opportunity to tailor coursework and research to individual interests. The program is small by design to promote close interaction between students and faculty.

Fields of Inquiry

Specific fields of inquiry include:

• Bureaucratic politics
• Comparative institutions
• Constitutional choice
• Government and business
• Interest groups
• Judicial institutions
• Law and economics
• Legislative behavior and organization
• Macro political economy
• Political economy of development
• Political behavior and public opinion

Cross-Campus Collaboration

The program, embedded in the larger community of political economics scholars at Stanford University, combines the resources of Stanford GSB with opportunities to study in the departments of economics and political science .

Drawing on the offerings of all three units, students have a unique opportunity to combine the strengths of economic methods and analytical political science and to apply them to the study of political economy. The program involves coursework in economic theory, econometrics, game theory, political theory, and theories of institutions and organizations.

Preparation and Qualifications

Faculty selects students on the basis of predicted performance in the PhD Program. Because of the rigorous nature of the program, a substantial background or ability in the use of analytical methods is an important factor in the admission decision.

In many instances, successful applicants have majored in economics, mathematics, or political science as undergraduates. However, this background is not a prerequisite for admission.

Students are expected to have, or to obtain during their first year, mathematical skill at the level of one year of calculus and one course each in linear algebra, analysis, probability, optimization, and statistics.

The successful applicant usually has clearly defined career goals that are compatible with the purposes of the program and is interested in doing basic research in empirical and/or theoretical political economics.

Faculty in Political Economics

Jonathan bendor, steven callander, katherine casey, dana foarta, andrew b. hall, bård harstad, saumitra jha, daniel p. kessler, neil malhotra, gregory j. martin, condoleezza rice, emeriti faculty, david p. baron, david w. brady, keith krehbiel, recent publications in political economics, trading stocks builds financial confidence and compresses the gender gap, effects of a u.s. supreme court ruling to restrict abortion rights, asymmetric ideological segregation in exposure to political news on facebook, recent insights by stanford business, studying news junkies reveals insights into online reading and info bubbles, the gap between the supreme court and most americans’ views is growing, the federal government pays farmers. that doesn’t mean farmers are fans..

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