Political Economy

Political Economy
Definition: refers to the study of how economic theory and methods influences political ideology. Political economy is the interplay between economics, law and politics, and how institutions develop in different social and economic systems, such as capitalism, socialism and communism. Political economy analyzes how public policy is created and implemented. Originally, the term is used for studying production, buying, and selling, and their relations with law, custom, and government, as well as with the distribution of national income and wealth. Political economy originated in moral philosophy. It developed in the 18th century as the study of the economies of states, polities, hence the term political economy.
In the late 19th century, the term economics came to replace political economy, coinciding with publication of an influential textbook by Alfred Marshall in 1890. Earlier, William Stanley Jevons, a proponent of mathematical methods applied to the subject, advocated economics for brevity and with the hope of the term becoming “the recognized name of a science.
Today, political economy, where it is not used as a synonym for economics, may refer to very different things, including Marxian analysis, applied public-choice approaches emanating from the Chicago school and the Virginia school, or simply the advice given by economists to the government or public on general economic policy or on specific proposals. A rapidly-growing mainstream literature from the 1970s has expanded beyond the model of economic policy in which planners maximize utility of a representative individual toward examining how political forces affect the choice of policies, especially as to distributional conflicts and political institutions.
Historical Background
Originally, political economy meant the study of the conditions under which production or consumption within limited parameters was organized in the nation-states. In this way, political economy expanded the emphasis of economics, which comes from the Greek oikos (meaning “home”) and nomos (meaning “law” or “order”); thus political economy was meant to express the laws of production of wealth at the state level, just as economics was the ordering of the home. The phrase économie politique (translated in English as political economy) first appeared in France in 1615 with the well known book by Antoine de Montchrétien: Traité de l’economie politique. French physiocrats, Adam Smith, David Ricardo and German philosopher and social theorist Karl Marx were some of the exponents of political economy. The world’s first professorship in political economy was established in 1754 at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy (then capital city of the Kingdom of Naples); the Neapolitan philosopher Antonio Genovesi was the first tenured professor; in 1763 Joseph von Sonnenfels was appointed a Political Economy chair at the University of Vienna, Austria. In 1805, Thomas Malthus became England’s first professor of political economy, at the East India Company College, Haileybury, Hertfordshire.
In the United States, political economy first was taught at the College of William and Mary; in 1784, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations was a required textbook.
Glasgow University, where Smith was Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy, changed the name of its Department of Political Economy to the Department of Economics (ostensibly to avoid confusing prospective undergraduates) in academic year 1997–98, making the class of 1998 the last to be graduated with a Scottish Master of Arts degree in Political Economy.
In its contemporary meaning, political economy refers to different, but related, approaches to studying economic and political behaviours, ranging from the combination of economics with other fields to the use of different, fundamental assumptions that challenge orthodox economic assumptions:
• Political economy most commonly refers to interdisciplinary studies drawing upon economics, law, and political science in explaining how political institutions, the political environment, and the economic system—capitalist, socialist, mixed—influence each other. “Traditional” topics include the influence of elections on the choice of economic policy, determinants of electoral outcomes, the political business cycles,central-bank independence, redistributive conflicts in fiscal policy, and the politics of delayed reforms in developing countries and of excessive deficits. From the late-1990s, the field has expanded to explore such wide-ranging topics as the origins and rate of change of political institutions, and the role of culture in explaining economic outcomes and developments.[4] When more narrowly construed, it analyzes such public policy as monopoly, market protection, institutional corruption, and rent-seeking. A more classical-liberal approach that dates from the 1970s that denotes ‘public-choice’ theory type approaches which question the benevolence of social planners to maximize the utility of a representative individual and instead stress how political forces affect the choice of policies that may not be so benevolent.
• Historians have employed political economy to explore the ways in the past that persons and groups with common economic interests have used politics to effect changes beneficial to their interests.[10]
• International Political Economy (IPE) is an interdisciplinary field comprising approaches to the actions of various actors. In the US, these approaches are associated with the journal International Organization, which, in the 1970s, became the leading journal of international political economy under the editorship of Robert Keohane, Peter J. Katzenstein, and Stephen Krasner. They are also associated with the journal The Review of International Political Economy. There also is a more critical school of IPE, inspired by Karl Polanyi’s work; two major figures are Matthew Watson and Robert W. Cox.
• Economists and political scientists often associate the term with approaches using rational choice assumptions, especially game theory and social choice theory, in explaining phenomena beyond economics’ standard remit, such as corruption, government failure and complex decision-making in which context the term “positive political economy” is common.
• Anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers use political economy in referring to the regimes of politics or economic values that emerge primarily at the level of states or regional governance, but also within smaller social groups and social networks. Because these regimes influence and are influenced by the organization of both social and economic capital, the analysis of dimensions lacking a standard economic value (e.g., the political economy of language, of gender, of religion) often draw on the concepts used in Marxian critiques of capital. Such approaches expand on neo-Marxian scholarship related to development and underdevelopment postulated by André Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein.
• New political economy students treat economic ideologies as the phenomenon to explain, per the traditions of Marxian political economy. Thus, Charles S. Maier suggests that a political economy approach: “interrogates economic doctrines to disclose their sociological and political premises….in sum, [it] regards economic ideas and behavior not as frameworks for analysis, but as beliefs and actions that must themselves be explained. This approach informs Andrew Gamble’s The Free Economy and the Strong State (Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), and Colin Hay’s The Political Economy of New Labour (Manchester University Press, 1999). It also informs much work published in New Political Economy an international journal founded by Sheffield University scholars in 1996.

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