political economy essay topics

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Topics in Political Economy

Module code: ec417c, module title: topics in political economy.

• ECTS Weighting : 10
• Semester/Term Taught : Hilary Term
• Contact Hours : 22 hours of lectures and approximately 4 hours of seminars
• Module Personnel : Lecturer - Professor Nicola Mastrorocco

Module Content

Hilary Term: This part of the module uses the skills and concepts acquired in the first semester to analyze a set of concrete topics which are at the frontier of the research in political economy.

Topics discussed during Hilary Term include:

• Media Bias and its impact on politics and economics
• The political economy of social media
• The political economy of immigration
• The political economy of organized crime
• The political economy of conflict
• Redistribution and Taxation
• Inequality and Public Goods

Module Learning Aims

The course will introduce students to the field of political economics, which applies the toolbox of economic analysis to the study of politics. The course will be organized around a series of topics: starting with the economic analysis of voting decision, it will then focus on the selection and motivations of politicians and their impact on public policy, and on questions such as political accountability and corruption; it will then examine the role of mass media and its impact on electoral politics and policy-making, as well as the issue of political distortions through examples such as patronage politics, lobbying, and political connections; finally, it will discuss issues related to organized crime, conflict and violence, as well as the origins, persistence and impact of political institutions

This module aims to:

• provide students with an exposure of the fundamental ideas in the field of political economy. The course will cover both theoretical and empirical papers
• introduce student to the variety of ways in which economists think about political economy and, more precisely, at the interplay of political science and economics.
• provide students interested in interdisciplinary work with a bridge between subjects as diverse as economics, political science, sociology, history, and philosophy;
• Political economy uses tools from economics (mainly game theory and econometrics) to study how political actors, institutions, and choices shape economic or political outcomes. Hence, students will be exposed to various concepts in game theory (e.g., Nash Equilibrium, Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium) as well as methods in empirical analysis (OLS, Instrumental Variable, Panel Data).
• provide students with the skills to write and argue coherently and persuasively; and provide students with the intellectual foundations on which an undergraduate dissertation can be written.

Learning Outcomes

• Analyze the effect of Mass Media on political outcomes, individual perceptions and voting decisions. How do media shape individual opinions and therefore their voting decisions? How does media affect citizens’ capacity to hold politicians accountable?
• Analyze the effect of Organized Crime and Corruption on political outcomes, economic decisions (public goods, fiscal policy) and social cohesion?
• Study the political economy of immigration in an era of refugees’ crisis.
• Analyze the most important political economy theory on redistribution and fiscal policies.

Recommended Reading List

The course will be primarily based on the reading of recent research academic papers and the in-depth discussion of their theories, empirical methods, and results.

The following books are recommended as supplements to what is covered in the lectures.

• Besley, Timothy: Principled Agents? Oxford University Press [2006] (henceforth: Besley)
• Mueller, Dennis: Public Choice III, Cambridge University Press [2005] (henceforth: Mueller)
•  Persson, Torsten & Guido Tabellini: Political Economics, MIT Press [2000] (henceforth P&T)
• Shepsle, Kenneth: Analyzing Politics, Norton [2010] (henceforth Shepsle)

Module Pre Requisite

This course is open to a multi-disciplinary audience. However, students should have completed one module in intermediate Economics (equivalent to EC2010) successfully. Exceptions to this rule are to be discussed with the Lecturer.

Assessment Details

Single-term students will hand in one problem set (10% of the overall grade) a reaction paper (10% of the overall grade) and  awritten essay based on their reading of the literature for this term, accounting for 80% of the overall grade.

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Article contents

International political economy: overview and conceptualization.

• Renée Marlin-Bennett Renée Marlin-Bennett International Studies, Johns Hopkins
•  and  David K. Johnson David K. Johnson Political Science, Johns Hopkins University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.239
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 22 December 2017
• This version: 22 January 2021
• Previous version

The concept of international political economy (IPE) encompasses the intersection of politics and economics as goods, services, money, people, and ideas move across borders. The term “international political economy” began to draw the attention of scholars in the mid-1960s amid problems of the world economy and lagging development in the third world. The term “global political economy” (GPE) later came to be used frequently to illustrate that what happens in the world is not only about interactions between states and that the GPE includes many different kinds of actors. The survey aims at a comprehensive picture of the different schools of IPE, both historically and as they have developed in the early 21st century. Authors of antiquity, such as Aristotle and Kautilya, explored the relationship between the political and the economic long before the term “political economy” was coined, presumably by Antoine de Montchrestien in 1613. The mercantilist writings of the 17th and 18th centuries, including those of Colbert, Mun, and Hamilton, argued in favor of the state using its powers to increase its wealth. List, writing in the 19th century, emphasized the tension between national economic self-determination and free markets. The 19th- to 20th-century iteration of the mercantilist view can be found in the form of economic nationalist policies, which link to a realist approach to international relations more generally. Theorists of the Global South have adapted economic nationalist policies to address the problem of development. The liberal tradition of IPE also has historical antecedents, beginning with classical political economy. Examples include the influential works of Locke, Hume, Smith, and Ricardo. After World War II, the economic writings of Keynes, Hayek, and Friedman were influential. Variants of neoliberal IPE can be found from the 1950s with scholarship on integration and from the late 1970s with scholarship on international regimes. Late-20th-century and early-21st-century liberal scholarship has also explored varieties of capitalism and economic crises. An alternative stream of IPE can be traced through Marxian political economy, beginning with the work of Marx and Engels in the 19th century and proliferating globally. This approach provides a critique of capitalism. Other critical approaches that have emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries include feminist global political economy and postcolonial critiques of liberal and Marxian analyses. Trends in scholarship include analyses of China and transition of the neoliberal order, queer theory for global political economy, and studies of growing trends toward precarious forms of labor. A final section discusses research beginning in the 1990s that is relevant to the global political economy of transborder transmission of disease, a topic of special concern in light of the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020.

• international political economy
• global political economy
• mercantilism
• economic nationalism
• classical liberalism
• neoliberal institutionalism
• neoclassical liberalism
• postcoloniality

Updated in this version

Light revision throughout, added discussions of postcoloniality and Covid-19

Introduction

Research in the field of international political economy, as described in this overview, includes work grounded in different schools of thought and drawing upon distinct conceptualizations of important concepts, relationships, and causal understandings. Antoine de Montchrestien ( 1889 ) is reputed to have introduced the term œconomie politique in his treatise of 1613 , by which he referred to the study of how states should manage the economy or make policy. The concept of international political economy has come to encompass a larger range of concerns, including the intersection of politics and economics, as goods, services, money, people, and ideas move across borders. The term “international political economy” (IPE) began to appear in the scholarly literature in the mid-1960s as problems of the world economy and development in the third world gained scholarly attention. The term “global political economy” (GPE) came into sporadic use at about the same time. GPE was (and is) often used more or less synonymously with IPE, though IPE approaches usually emphasize the individual nation-state as the basic unit of analysis, while GPE approaches tend to be more holistic, placing states and other kinds of actors within larger structures or the global system. Gill ( 1990 ) notes that in the 1980s, the terminological difference between IPE and GPE came to mark a difference in methodological orientation, mapping onto more or less “mainstream” and “critical” approaches, respectively. By the end of the 1990s, the GPE came to be used by both mainstream scholars (Gilpin, 2001 , and Cohn, 2016 , are examples) and critical scholars, although critical scholars are more likely to use GPE exclusively. (This article omits a full discussion of the development of IPE in the Global South and its engagement with GPE, a topic covered in Deciancio and Quiliconi, 2020 ). This survey of IPE and GPE scholarship proceeds in a roughly historical plan and consists of eight sections. It begins with some very early works on the intersection of politics and economics, and then it turns to the mercantilist school and its 20th-century successor, economic nationalism. The next section traces the development of the liberal tradition of political economy, including classical political economy, Keynesianism, neoclassical economics, and neoliberalism. This discussion is followed by sections on the Marxian, feminist, and postcolonial global political economy. The penultimate section briefly discusses some trends of scholarship in the 21st century , especially moving into the 2020s. The survey concludes with a discussion of scholarship (published prior to May 2020 ) that is relevant for assessing the global political economy reverberations of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

Politics and Economics: Early Works

The study of the relationship between economic activities and state interests originated long before the term “political economy” was coined. Two examples of very early works include writings by Aristotle ( 384–322 bce ), who criticized Plato’s conception of communal ownership and placed the state in the role of guarantor of private property in The Politics , and Kautilya ( ca . 350–283 bce ), the Indian author of Arthashastra , a book of statecraft, who wrote of the need for the ruler to send spies to the marketplace to ensure fair weights and measures (Kautilya, 1915 ). In the Middle Ages, Islamic social theorist Ibn Khaldun ( 1332–1406 ) wrote about the relationship between governing structures and productivity of people (Ibn Khaldun, 1967 ). Another Muslim scholar of this era, Al-Maqrizi (d. 1442) ( 1994 ), analyzed governmental policies, including monetary policy. Niccolò Machiavelli ( 1469–1527 ), generally seen as a political theorist, was mindful of the relationship between the state and the economy as well, at least in the sense that a primary role of the prince or of a republican government is to protect private property. He called “public security and the protection of the laws [. . .] the sinews of agriculture and of commerce,” and suggested that the protection of property rights was important “so that the one may not abstain from embellishing his possessions for fear of their being taken from him, and [. . .] not hesitate to open a new traffic for fear of taxes” (Machiavelli, 1882 , p. 448; see also Machiavelli, 1979 , ch. XVI, on how princes ought to spend—or not spend—money).

Governments traditionally were held responsible for defending their own citizens’ property, but they had no such obligation toward conquered peoples. The European Age of Exploration led unsurprisingly to the expropriation of resources, since the purpose of those conquests was to bring home wealth in the form of gold, silver, and other precious materials. Enslavement of the indigenous peoples and profiting from their resources was considered consistent with natural law, as Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, drawing on Aristotle, argued in 1550 (Garcia-Pelayo, 1986 ).

Sepúlveda’s opinion was commonly, but not universally, held. The famous opposition to Spain’s inhuman treatment of indigenous people was published by Bartolomé de Las Casas in 1552 . He charged that the “avarice and ambition” that motivated the Spaniards and led them to perpetrate acts of barbarism were, to use a modern term, “illegitimate” (Las Casas, 2007 ). At a time when imperial conquest was considered the natural goal for states, Las Casas sounded a normative message—that the state cannot act with impunity and that the quest for riches does not excuse unjust forms of violence. The Sepúlveda–Las Casas debate prefigured future debates over the norms of international political economic interaction.

From Mercantilism to Economic Nationalism

Adam Smith referred dismissively to the various theories and policies on how states should intervene in markets to increase wealth and power as “mercantilism.” The more neutral-sounding “economic nationalism” became the successor term in more recent times. In both cases, assumptions about the role of the state conform to a general realist model, although a form of economic nationalism has also been espoused by theorists and polities of the Global South with the aim of “delinking” from relations of dependency on the North. This section traces the development of theories of mercantilism and economic nationalism from the 16th century to the 21st .

Mercantilism

The two-volume history of mercantilism by Eli Heckscher ( 1935 ) outlines at least four elements of this school of thought. Following List, and especially Schmoller, mercantilism is identified as the economic element of creating national states from disparate regions. Mercantilism is also characterized as a specific conceptualization of the nature of wealth that stresses the critical nature of inflows. The lack of reciprocal demand, the difficulty of facilitating accumulation in early agrarian societies, and the differential ability of various economic pursuits regarding generating employment opportunities are central to this element. A third characterization of mercantilism is as a body of policy designed to decrease the cost of inputs and facilitate production in the face of competition. Finally, mercantilism is characterized as a belief in the importance of enhancing the power and wealth of a state, so that it is better able to direct resources both at home and abroad. The best-known mercantilist theories focus on maintaining a positive balance of trade and payments by limiting imports or encouraging exports. One variant, bullionism, focuses on the desirability of increasing a country’s supply of gold and silver. (See Viner, 1937 , for a detailed history of English writings on mercantilism and “bullionism” prior to Adam Smith. A more recent and strongly proneoclassical liberal discussion of the relationship of historical theories of mercantilism to monetary policy can be found in Humphrey, 1999 .)

European exploration and conquest of new lands led to intellectual debate, starting in France in the 16th century , over which policies would best achieve these ends. An influx of gold and silver led to instability in the value of money. Commentators began to consider the government’s role in determining the value of money, the terms of trade, and other facets of what scholars since the mid- 20th century would call international political economy. Jean Bodin, for example, wrote in 1568 about how the value of specie would fluctuate with supply and demand and warned that government interference would only worsen the situation. “A ruler,” he wrote, “who changes the price of gold and silver ruins his people, country and himself” (cited in Turchetti, 2018 ). Instead, as Luigi Cossa ( 1880 , p. 117) noted, Bodin argued that the oversupply of money that resulted in price increases “would be turned to better advantage by a fiscal system promoting the growth of national manufactures in opposition to the excessive consumption of foreign goods.” Antoine de Monchrestien drew heavily on the work of Bodin to advocate for government protection of manufactures. (See Ashley, 1891 , and Perry, 1883 , for discussions of Monchrestien’s work.)

An influential supporter of mercantilism was Jean Baptiste Colbert, minister of finance for King Louis XIV of France. He increased taxes, created benefits for production that would substitute for imports, and worked to bring wealth into the country through his policies, which were referred to as Colbertism. In 1664 , he wrote a memorandum to the king in which he argued “that only the abundance of money in a State makes the difference in its greatness and power.” He advocated government intervention in markets to increase domestic manufactures, to encourage imports of raw materials to be used for manufactures, and to support the exportation of manufactured goods. To encourage French traders to sell goods widely, he also advocated rewards for building or buying new ships and for long-distance voyages (Colbert, 1998 ). Thomas Mun, a director of the British East India Company, expressed similar views in a widely read defense of mercantilism. He argued that a country’s wealth is increased if a positive balance of trade is maintained. England should try to produce as much of what it must consume as possible and import as little as possible for its own consumption. People should tame their appetites to avoid wanting foreign garments and foods. However, having English traders purchase valuable wares from distant locales, bring them back to England, and, from England, reexport them would, according to Mun, serve to increase the national treasure. Mercantilism, in other words, would result in a net inflow of gold and silver—commodities not produced in any great quantity from English mines—and this would be the only way for England to increase its wealth (Mun, 1895 ).

The protectionist policies of mercantilism held considerable attractiveness as countries sought to industrialize and develop their economies. Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, provided a Report on Manufactures to Congress in which he outlined steps that the young country should take to secure its economy, especially in opposition to the economic might of other countries. Creating an economy based on manufactures, Hamilton argued, would protect the United States from being dependent on other countries “for military and other essential supplies.” He implicitly countered the argument of the physiocrats, discussed in the section “ Early Liberal Writers ,” who stressed the importance of agriculture over manufactures. Hamilton maintained that the country was best served by encouraging the development of manufacturing. Using machines would allow for the full employment of the population (including women and children) in order to increase the country’s self-sufficiency—and therefore its wealth and security (Hamilton, 1913 , p. 3).

Friedrich List, a German scholar and politician who later became a naturalized American citizen, extended Hamilton’s argument by emphasizing that states should take advantage of their own human resources—that is, the ability of people to produce agricultural and manufactured products through their innovation, hard work, and the natural environment. He argued that “it is of the utmost concern for a nation [. . .] first fully to supply its own wants, its own consumption with the products of its own manufactures,” he wrote. Only then should a country trade with others. List also developed the proposition that young economies could not compete with more established, more technologically advanced ones until the younger country had invested in developing its domestic industry. He emphasized “that a nation is richer and more powerful in proportion as it exports more manufactured products, imports more raw materials, and consumes more tropical commodities.” Government policies should therefore work toward these goals (List, 1909 , pp. 76–77). For a classic but much overlooked contribution to the tensions between protectionism and free trade in theories of IPE, see E. H. Carr ( 2001 , pp. 41–62).

Economic Nationalism

The 20th century marked a shift in theoretical labels. “Mercantilism” was supplanted by “economic nationalism,” a more neutral term and one that is more easily interpreted from a realist perspective. Economic nationalists are realists who expect the contest for wealth to mirror the contest for power in international relations. However, they often articulate a somewhat schizophrenic view: theorists who write about economic nationalism often see it as an unfortunate, economically inefficient, but unavoidable fact of international life. For example, in 1931 , T. E. Gregory criticized economic nationalism, but explained that such policies continued to be implemented because citizens and governments were reacting to six factors. They (a) feared “dependence on foreign markets for the sale of your products”; (b) saw “the danger of intervention in the domestic market by the foreign capitalist”; (c) desired “to reserve for the intelligence of the country itself such positions of honour and prestige as are offered by the existence of growing industries and a growing financial structure”; (d) realized “the undesirability of allowing [. . .] raw materials to be owned by foreigners”; (e) worried about the risk “that in a period of war, if you depend on foreign food supplies, you may find yourself in a very difficult situation, and therefore you ought to grow your own food”; and (f) believed that keeping “agriculture going as a type of economic production” would guarantee a supply of “vigorous manhood”—men who would be strong soldiers in times of war (pp. 292–294). Similarly, Gregory’s contemporary, Charles Schrecker, begins his discussion of “the causes, characteristics and possible consequences” of economic nationalism with the caveat that he “consider[s] this tendency [toward economic nationalism] in its ultimate effects to be regrettable and detrimental to the future economic welfare of humanity” (Schrecker, 1934 , p. 208).

This differentiation between the scholars’ personal beliefs and their analytical stance continues in more recent scholarship. Judith Goldstein ( 1986 ) discusses the principle of “free and fair” trade as a norm of U.S. trade policy, and she finds that while “free trade” is consistent with liberal economic analysis (which, by implication, she endorses), “fair trade” refers to protecting U.S. firms from unfair trade practices of other countries. In other words, U.S. trade policy ultimately pursues mechanisms that support the interests of those groups that capture the state and persuade policymakers of their claims. Eric Helleiner ( 2002 ), through a careful reading of the 19th-century economic nationalists, makes the sophisticated argument that economic nationalism has always been nationalist—that is, realist—first and economic second. In other words, he argues that countries choose economic policies for nationalist purposes. Sometimes these policies will be liberal, when it suits the country to deploy liberal policies; sometimes the policies will be protectionist, when protection is expected to lead to desired ends. In this analysis, liberal policies may be wholly consistent with theoretical explanations of economic nationalism. In a similar vein, Robert Gilpin clarifies the separation of analytical tools and preferred outcomes. He implicitly accepts the normative goals of liberalism while interpreting behavior in terms of “state centric realism,” a theoretical perspective closely connected to economic nationalism. He writes, “Although realists recognize the central role of the state, security, and power in international affairs, they do not necessarily approve of this situation. [. . .] It is possible to analyze international economic affairs from a realist perspective and at the same time to have normative commitment to certain ideals” (Gilpin, 2001 , pp. 15–16). Cohn ( 2016 ) elaborates these difficulties in the treatment of “neomercantilism.”

Economic Nationalism and Development

For many theorists, however, economic nationalism takes on a more positive hue when argued from the position of infant industries and developing country economies that need to develop internally before they can compete in global markets. Thus, tenets of economic nationalism have appealed to many writers in the Global South. Julius Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania, could be considered a (somewhat ironic) example. Nyerere’s ujamaa (“familyhood”) policies can be divided into two: a frankly socialist “villagization” policy in which people were moved onto collective farms and a mercantilist self-reliance policy in which Tanzania was supposed to detach itself from dependence on the industrialized world. Ultimately, his policy failed on both counts: the collective farms were unproductive, Tanzania became more dependent on aid from other countries, and the democratic ideals of the movement deteriorated (Prashad, 2008 , pp. 191–203). The idea of self-reliance, however, resonates closely with economic nationalist emphasis on the ability of states to produce for their own basic needs (Amin, 1990 ; Nyerere, 1967 ).

In general, theories advocating import substitution industrialization fall into this category of developing country economic nationalism. Economist Raúl Prebisch, working on behalf of the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, formulated the theory of dependent development, which explained how industrialization in the developing world could continue to keep countries dependent on advanced economies in the “core.” These peripheral country economies were too closely tied to production for export. Instead, he argued that developing countries needed to implement import-substituting industrialization (ISI) policies. By delinking from the dependent economic relationships that they have with core countries, developing countries could build their own economies. He advocated the mechanization of agriculture, industrialization, and technological advance (Prebisch, 1986 ). In short, “the fundamental arguments of [Alexander] Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures have a striking similarity with those of Prebisch and his staff” (Grunwald, 1970 , p. 826). (Of course, the results of ISI policies have been highly uneven. See, for example, the analysis of Albert Hirschman, 1968 , and Vijay Prashad, 2014 , on the difficulties of ISI as a development strategy.)

From Classical Liberalism to Neoliberal Institutionalism and Neoclassical Liberalism

In contrast to the emphasis on state power and state interests that characterizes mercantilism and economic nationalism, liberalism emphasizes possessive individualism and the individual as the bearer of rights (Macpherson, 1973 ). The political economic theory that results from the emphasis on the individual is grounded in the idea that markets should be allowed to function as freely as possible and that the purpose of economic activity is not to benefit the government but rather to benefit individuals who, through their efforts, earn income, purchase goods, and constitute the basic unit of economic life.

Early Liberal Writers

Among the most important of these liberal rights from the perspective of political economy is that of property. For John Locke ( 1884 ), the right to property was natural; for David Hume ( 1992 ), the right to property was the result of interactions over time between people. (See also Sugden, 1989 , on Hume’s view of property.) Liberals reject the idea that the purpose of the state is to gather wealth. Instead, the state exists to provide security and to safeguard property.

In the liberal tradition, “political economy” came to be associated expansively with the relationship between governments, markets, welfare, and wealth. Discourse on Political Economy by Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( 1983 ), originally written for Diderot’s Encyclopédie , was an example of this. For Rousseau, political economy referred rather generally to those policies and laws that aim to protect and promote society being governed. What set Rousseau’s view apart from mercantilism was the liberal ethos that pervaded his writing: citizens were individuals who held rights; they had private wills; and collectively the community as a whole had a general will. States were bound by the rule of law and, in adhering to the general will, had the responsibility for protecting citizens’ rights, including property rights, but Rousseau was silent on what later writers would term “laissez-faire” policies, a free market vision of popular (as opposed to tyrannical) political economy. Instead, Rousseau seemed to have a very specific view of important government intervention in the economy: “One of the most important functions of the government” is to prevent extreme differences in wealth, since extremes of opulence and poverty erode the sense of “common cause” among citizens. To prevent such inequality and to provide the other functions of government, the state must tax, but, because the right to one’s own property was fundamental, taxation must be limited and levied fairly and progressively (those living at subsistence levels paying nothing, the rich paying relative to their wealth), in accordance with the general will. Rousseau’s popular political economy was thus liberal in protecting rights yet interventionist with respect to taxation and the uses of taxes.

The physiocrats introduced the idea of laissez-faire , laissez-passer (“let do and let pass,” in other words, the government should not interfere in the market) as a goal for states. They argued that the state should avoid intervention wherever possible, and especially avoid the taxation of agriculture. François Quesnay’s Economical Table presented a view of economics that placed a strong emphasis on the value of agriculture and the “sterility” of manufactures (Quesnay, 1968 ), in contrast to the mercantile emphasis on encouraging manufactures. The physiocrats favored agriculture because, in their calculation, the value of the output—crops—exceeded the value of the inputs used to produce the crops: land, labor, seeds, and the like. Artisans who manufactured things, the physiocrats maintained, only produced goods that equal the value of the inputs because competition would drive prices down to the level that only covered costs. Quesnay and the other physiocrats understood the limited supply of land and the ability of farmers to produce more than was needed for subsistence as evidence of the superior productivity of agriculture (Quesnay, 1968 ; also Bilginsoy, 1994 ). A major policy goal of the physiocrats was to “prevent deviations of the market price of industrial goods from their fundamental price, and to guarantee the maintenance of the proper price in the agricultural sector—the price high enough to cover the unit costs and rent” (Bilginsoy, 1994 , p. 531). The government, in their view, should limit taxes on agricultural products to ways that meet this goal. The French policies then in place of protecting manufacturers from foreign imports and of the government selling the right to tax farming to wealthy citizens thus had a particularly deleterious effect on the economy (Quesnay, n.d. ).

Adam Smith, whose Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is often seen as the foundational work in the field of political economy, built on the work of the physiocrats, as well as that of Hume. Smith, who first referred to political economy in the eighth paragraph of the introduction to the book, understood the term as concerning causal theories about what governments believe they ought to do—which policies they think they should implement—to increase their wealth. The purpose of political economy, according to Smith ( 1904 ), was

first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign. (Book IV, Introduction)

The first purpose is achieved primarily through free markets, with Smith advocating for reliance upon “invisible hand.” The second is achieved through some government involvement in the economy, including the provision of funds for militias to defend against foreign invaders; setting up a system to pay for the administration of justice (with revenues for this purpose coming, perhaps, from court fees); providing public works such as roads, bridges, and postal services (which, with fees attached, may produce revenue for the government); and education (Viner, 1948 ).

For what later came to be known as international political economy, Adam Smith, like the physiocrats before him, made a major intellectual contribution with his rejection of the common mercantile practices of his age. In contrast to mercantilists like Colbert and Mun, Smith opposed the government’s intervention in markets to maintain a positive balance of trade. Smith ( 1904 ) wrote:

We trust, with perfect security, that the freedom of trade, without any attention of government, will always supply us with the wine which we have occasion for; and we may trust, with equal security, that it will always supply us with all the gold and silver which we can afford to purchase or to employ, either in circulating our commodities or in other uses. (IV.1.11)

Some IPE scholars, however, have highlighted Smith’s “agonism” in relation to the contradictions of the free market system, reading Smith not so much as an unequivocal supporter of the laissez-faire economics, as he is often assumed to be, but rather as a careful observer of the positive and negative aspects of the market economy (Arrighi, 2007 ; Blaney & Inayatullah, 2010 ; Shilliam, 2020 ). This reading both contributes to a reappraisal of the classical tradition and serves as a critique of its contemporary reception in neoclassical economic theory, suggesting a different path for economic studies at large.

Immanuel Kant, in his famous essay on perpetual peace, extended the liberal optimism about the beneficial effects of trade. An international federation of republics would naturally trade with each other, and the positive effects of commerce would stand as a bulwark against hostilities. “The spirit of trade cannot coexist with war, and sooner or later this spirit dominates every people. For among all those powers (or means) that belong to a nation, financial power may be the most reliable in forcing nations to pursue the noble cause of peace (though not from moral motives)” (Kant, 1983 , p. 125). Thus, as scholars such as Jahn ( 2013 ) and Ince ( 2018 ) have demonstrated, classical liberal thought has always contained an essentially international dimension, the study of which is instructive for understanding later forms of liberal IPE.

Comparative Advantage

An important question for international political economy is, Why engage in international trade? In On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation , Englishman David Ricardo ( 1821 ) built upon Smith’s support for international trade. In this work, Ricardo outlined the theory of comparative costs (comparative advantage), a cornerstone of trade theory to the present day. The common view had been that states trade with one another when one has an absolute advantage in the production of something and the trading partner has an absolute advantage in the production of something else. (If England produced cloth more cheaply than Portugal did, and Portugal produced wine more cheaply than England did, then both countries would profit from trade.) Ricardo’s insight was that even if a country produced both wine and cloth more cheaply than another, it still made sense for the countries to specialize in and export that good it had the greatest advantage in producing. This theory depended on another theoretical contribution from Ricardo, the labor theory of value: the value of a product can be represented in the amount of labor (person-hours) needed to produce it (a good summary of the theory can be found in Ruffin, 2002 ).

Comparative advantage continued to be a topic of discussion in international political economy. Swedish economists Eli Hecksher and Bertil Ohlin ( 1991 ) contributed a major extension of Ricardo’s theory by focusing on the role that factor endowments play in determining comparative advantage. Since land, labor, and capital move less easily than goods, a country should specialize in those products that are produced with the factors that are relatively abundant in the country. (Jacob Viner, 1937 , pp. 500–507, provided a summary and critical analysis of this theory, and Wolfgang Stolper and Paul Samuelson further developed the theory by examining what happens to prices when two countries move from not trading to trading. The consequence can be higher prices, which can affect income distribution, as discussed in Lindert and Kindleberger, 1982 , pp. 58–60.)

Some scholars have begun to note areas in which the traditional understanding of comparative advantage no longer fits the evidence. For example, Michael Storper ( 1992 ) finds that

the world of production has changed fundamentally since the time of Ricardo. We now live in a world where factors of production for technologically stable products are not endowed, but produced as intermediate inputs. Almost any developed country making the effort can become as efficient as the next country in a technologically stable manufacturing sector. (pp. 63–64)

Storper ( 1992 ) argues that products that depend on technological innovation are traded with respect to “technological advantage” rather than comparative advantage.

Another question about the validity of comparative advantage is raised by strategic trade theory. James Brander and Barbara Spencer ( 1985 , p. 83) showed how protection through subsidies would “change the initial conditions of the game that firms play” and make a firm more profitable. By calibrating the protection properly—not too much, not too little—states, according to strategic trade theory, can lead to an equilibrium that may be jointly suboptimal, but the protecting country still gains because its firm is able to earn more. Although strategic trade theory shares some elements with mercantile support for the protection of infant industry, those arguing for strategic trade theory place themselves within a liberal model and seek rational intervention at the best possible levels (i.e., levels that provide net benefits). Some scholars suggest that strategic trade theory is most useful when considering the challenges faced by industries when there are large economies of scale, high learning curves, and knowledge-intensive advanced manufacturing processes. Paul Krugman and others offer a cautionary note, however. The benefits of strategic trade theory fall mainly to the protected firm or industry, not to the domestic economy. Overall costs are likely to outweigh benefits, especially when protectionism leads to trade war (Krugman, 1994 ).

Two Strands of Liberalism: Keynesianism and Neoclassical Liberalism

As the questions raised by strategic trade theory suggest, liberals wrestle with the appropriate role of the state in the economy. Since the middle of the 20th century , liberalism has been bifurcated into two major strands: Keynesianism and neoclassical liberalism. Keynesian economics, named after John Maynard Keynes, sees direct government intervention in markets as a way to improve welfare and make the economy function better, especially given inescapable market failures and inefficiencies. Neoclassical economics, sometimes understood as libertarianism, draws on the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and others who believed that governments had become too involved in the economy and that freedom suffered as a result. Keynesianism filtered into international political economy, with variants consistent with integration theory, neoliberal institutionalism, and regimes (which are a form of neoliberal institutionalism). Neoclassical liberalism can be seen in the “Washington Consensus,” which has led to deregulation of global and domestic economies, decreases in foreign aid, and further reliance on marketization.

Keynesianism and Neoliberal Institutionalism

John Maynard Keynes ( 1883–1946 ) served on the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 . He resigned from this position in opposition to the draconian terms of peace. The Allies, in ending the war “with France and Italy abusing their momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds” (Keynes, 1920 , I.4). During World War II, he served on the British delegation in the Bretton Woods negotiations on the postwar monetary order. Central to Keynesian economics is the idea that free markets will not ( contra classical theory) always find an equilibrium at full employment. Instead, crises of underemployment call for public expenditures, for example, in public works (Keynes, 1936 , 1937 ; Galbraith, 1968 .)

Integration Theory

An important inference from Keynesianism is that institutions and governance can be used to create better political, social, and economic outcomes. In contrast to economic nationalism and to neoclassical economics, as James Caporaso ( 1998 , pp. 3–4) noted, integration theorists understood that institutions matter because institutions alter the conditions in which exchanges of various kinds take place by establishing rules. In addition, integration theorists explicitly tied a goal of peaceful relations among nations to integration: liberal markets, with well-functioning institutions, would lead to peaceful outcomes that would be conducive to commercial ties, which would once again feed back and encourage more cooperation. Drawing on both Keynesian liberalism and contributions from sociology to an understanding of cooperative action (Parsons, Shils, & Smelser, 2001 ), integration theory sought a formula for creating the institutions that would promote positive, peaceful outcomes.

Historically, integration theory emerged with discussion by David Mitrany ( 1948 ) of functionalism and world organization. With the cataclysmic effects of both world wars firmly in mind, Mitrany described a world in which functional integration—cooperation and institution building on specific functional tasks and in specific functional areas—would lead to a more peaceful outcome. He wrote:

If one were to visualize a map of the world showing economic and social activities, it would appear as an intricate web of interests and relations crossing and recrossing political divisions comes that would be conducive to commercial, but a map pulsating with the realities of everyday life. They are the natural basis for international organizations: and the task is to bring that map, which is a functioning reality, under joint international government, at least in its essential lines. The political lines will then in time be overlaid and blurred by this web of joint relations and administrations. (Mitrany, 1948 , pp. 358RERL)

Karl Deutsch and Ernst Haas both furthered the study of how functional cooperation may lead to political cooperation. Deutsch found “economic ties,” communication across territorial borders and social strata, “mobility of persons,” and a wide range of different kinds of communication and transaction (among other factors) to be necessary conditions for amalgamation of separate states into a “security-community” (Deutsch, 1957 , p. 58). Haas ( 1964 ) further emphasized the connection between liberalism and functional integration theory. “Integration,” he wrote, “is conceptualized as resulting from an institutionalized pattern of interest politics, played out within existing international organizations. [. . .] There is no common good other than that perceived through the interest-tinted lenses worn by the international actors” (p. 35). Having functional interests in common, states would be able to cooperate, especially when international organizations create the conditions that would facilitate cooperation. Unfortunately, this theory failed in that the hopeful expectations about how international organizations would foster integration and peaceful cooperation did not come to fruition (at least not in the near term, after the publication of these works). Philippe Schmitter offered a revision of the theory that was at once more modest in its predictions and less precise in its specifications of complex expected interactions. Schmitter ( 1970 ) thus presents a less deterministic version: under some conditions, integration may result from the complex functional interactions of states.

Interdependence, Regimes, and Neoliberal Institutionalism

Although it soon became apparent that the hopeful expectation about how international organizations would foster integration and peaceful cooperation would not come to fruition, the main liberal tenets of integration theory continued to play a role in IPE theory. Neoliberal institutionalism soon superseded integration theory as the major approach to IPE among those who followed this Keynesian side of liberalism. The “institutionalism” in neoliberal institutionalism may have been drawn from the economics literature, in which institutionalism referred to “an approach which stresses the interactions between social institutions and economic relationships and aspects of behavior, aims to present an orderly arrangement of economic phenomena in which institutions are elevated from the status of the exception and the footnote, and integrated with the main body of economics” (Eveline Burns, in Homan et al., 1931 , p. 135). Both sociology (Parsons, 1935 ) and political science (Apter, 1957 ) adopted the term, to refer to approaches that explore how organized groups are and what they do in society.

Early links between institutionalism and political economy can be found in an International Studies Association conference panel on “Patterns of International Institutionalism” (Rohn, 1968 ). James March and Johan Olsen ( 1984 ) reviewed the revival of institutionalist thought in political science in the 1970s and 1980s and suggested that the new institutionalism is “simply an argument that the organization of political life makes a difference.” From this parsimonious insight, however, institutionalists opened the examination of how cooperative interactions could regularly, even ubiquitously, comprise IPE. These investigations resulted in the development of both interdependence theory and the concept of international regimes.

“Interdependence,” encapsulating various kinds of interactions and mutual dependencies that promoted peaceful interactions, did not rise to the level of significant scholarly appreciation until the 1970s. The idea had been around for a while. In 1958 , John Foster Dulles, then Secretary of State of the United States, referred specifically to interdependence when he asserted that providing development aid and encouraging trade would combine with military security cooperation to prevent developing countries from falling into the Soviet orbit. A few years later, Vincent Rock ( 1964 ) suggested, perhaps in a fairly unrealistic vein, that interdependence in scientific, trade, and other kinds of interactions would lead to peace between the United States and the Soviet Union. Edward L. Morse refined the concept of interdependence to argue that the “low policies” that involved economic transactions and welfare interests were becoming more important for international relations than the “high policies” of military strategic concerns. Consequently, “the classical goals of power and security have been expanded to, or superseded by, goals of wealth and welfare. [. . .] [T]he old identification of power and security with territory and population has been changed to an identification of welfare with economic growth” (Morse, 1970 , pp. 379–380). Richard Cooper ( 1972 , p. 159) further developed the idea “to refer to the sensitivity of economic transactions between two or more nations to economic developments within those nations.” Cooper, however, saw interdependence as a policy conundrum for states, rather than as a means to more peaceful outcomes in international relations. Richard Rosecrance and Arthur Stein ( 1973 , p. 22) emphasized the unpredictability of the situation in the 1970s: “Whether interdependence will emerge as positive or negative will depend largely on old-fashioned cooperation among governments.”

In a 1974 publication, Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr., focused on interdependence between the United States and Canada. Drawing on Oran Young’s definition of interdependence (Young, 1968 ), Keohane and Nye ( 1974 , p. 606) studied “patterns of interdependence, particularly with regard to symmetry” on policy issues and how patterns of interdependence were “used as sources of bargaining power.” Keohane and Nye ( 1977 ) further developed this concept into “complex interdependence,” in which actors would have varying levels of sensitivity or vulnerability to each other across “multiple channels” (i.e., across different issue areas) in which military issues would not be more important but rather there would be no clear hierarchy among the issues; and in which these ties across these issues would preclude the use of military force.

Attention to interdependence and international institutions highlighted how states and other actors were sensitive and vulnerable to each other. Scholars also questioned whether the interdependence would lead to coordinated action to solve collective international public goods problems. Even if integration, in the functional sense, was not happening completely and directly, could some sort of coordination short of full-fledged integration be going on? International “regimes,” a term borrowed from the legal scholarship by Ernst B. Haas, provided a tentative affirmative answer to this question. In Haas’s description, international regimes were “collective arrangements among nations designed to create or more effectively use scientific and technological capabilities” and that would “minimize the undesired consequences associated with the creation and exploitation of such capabilities” (Haas, 1975b , p. 147; see also Haas, 1975a ). Later debates over the definition of the term included Haas’s restatement: “ Regimes are norms, rules, and procedures agreed to in order to regulate an issue-area ” (Haas, 1980 , p. 358 (emphasis in the original); see also Young, 1980 ). Keohane and Nye ( 1977 , p. 19), in their book on interdependence, took up the issue of regimes as well, referring to them as “the sets of governing arrangements that affect relationships of interdependence.”

The concept of regimes became more formalized in 1982 with the publication of a special issue of the journal International Organization edited by Stephen D. Krasner ( 1982a ), which was republished as an edited book (Krasner, 1983 ). The group of influential scholars writing for this publication agreed upon a uniform definition:

Regimes can be defined as sets of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actors that affect relationships of interdependencees” (Haasterdependence would lead to coordinated action to solve collective inte. Norms are standards of behavior defined in terms of rights and obligations. Rules are specific prescriptions or proscriptions for action. Decision making procedures are prevailing practices for making and implementing collective choice. (Krasner, 1982b , p. 186)

Under this umbrella definition, the authors divided themselves into three separate groups: those who understood regimes to be ubiquitous, “Grotians,” since their views were consistent with that of the 17th-century scholar of international law, Hugo Grotius (Young, 1980 ; e.g., Puchala & Hopkins, 1982 ); those who saw in regimes a possibility for states to escape—sometimes—the pessimistic outcomes of a realist world by creating opportunities for rational actors to cooperate (the “modified structuralists,” like Stein, 1982 ); and those, represented in the volume by Susan Strange ( 1982 ), who thought that regimes obscured, rather than elucidated, what was really going on in the world. (None of these authors questioned who “gave” the issue area, or how it was given, a question that was later raised by constructivists such as Onuf, 1989 , and Marlin-Bennett, 1993 .)

Notwithstanding criticisms, the usefulness of the analytical construct of regimes was that it shifted attention to issues, those questions of international political economy around which negotiations were held, agreements struck, deals kept or not kept. The regimes literature spawned a host of studies of different kinds of issues. By looking at the institutions and the normative structures that made cooperation possible, regimes theorists and empirical researchers opened up the opportunity to see how the vast majority of interactions in the world—those that do not involve military hostilities—actually occur and are ordered. Among the many such works are Rittberger ( 1993 ), Martin and Simmons ( 1998 ), Nadelmann ( 1990 ), Nye ( 1987 ), Peterson ( 2005a ), and Cogburn ( 2017 )

The attention to institutions and the role they play under conditions of a relatively liberal international political economy led scholars to start referring to all these approaches to integration and regimes in a globalizing world as “neoliberal institutionalism” (Keohane, 1984 ). Often contrasted with structural realism, neoliberal institutionalism assumes that rational actors can cooperate under conditions of anarchy because institutions provide rules that the actors are willing to accept and because actors are happy with absolute gains, rather than struggling for relative gains (as a state-centric realist or economic nationalist would assume), from any set of proposed arrangements. Many, however, see flaws in the theoretical edifice of neoliberal institutionalism. Robert Powell ( 1991 ), for example, suggests that both structural realism and neoliberal institutionalism are special cases of a single model of states attempting to pursue their interests under conditions of anarchy and constraints imposed by different capabilities among the actors in the system. Others contest neoliberal institutionalism’s empirical validity (Drezner, 2001 , among others) and its conceptualization of anarchy (Grieco, 1988 ). Yet others disagree with the implicit assumption that neoliberal institutionalist cooperation is good , that cooperation necessarily leads to more peaceful, more materially comfortable, and more emancipatory outcomes (Keeley, 1990 ; Kokaz, 2005 ; Marchand, 1994 ). The intellectual history by Cohen ( 2008 ) provides an overview and assessment of the development of regimes theory.

Neoclassical Liberalism

The other major stream of liberalism diverges from the neoliberal institutionalism and the Keynesian emphasis on coordination through regulation of (global) economic interactions. The neoclassical liberals, including economists of the Austrian School and leading U.S. economists such as Milton Friedman, understood government intervention as damaging to markets and consequently to the economic freedoms of society. Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. von Hayek, two leaders of the Austrian School, advocated antisocialist, antigovernment intervention policies (Hayek, 1994 ; von Mises, 1998 ).

Milton Friedman similarly argued in favor of letting markets operate without government intervention. Government policies that seek to manipulate markets for political outcomes are unavoidable errors, in his view. In an article coauthored with Anna J. Schwartz, the economists conclude that

leaving monetary and banking arrangements to the market would have produced a more satisfactory outcome than was actually achieved through governmental involvement. Nevertheless, we also believe that the same [political] forces that prevented that outcome in the past will continue to prevent it in the future. (Friedman & Schwartz, 1986 , p. 311)

For Friedman, the role of government is important but limited. With Rose Friedman, he wrote:

“Government is essential both as a forum for determining the ‘rules of the game’ and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.” Markets, on the other hand, “reduce greatly the range of issues that must be decided through political means, and thereby [. . .] minimize the extent to which government need participate directly in the game.” (Friedman & Friedman, 1982 , p. 15)

The ascendancy of laissez-faire economics resulted in the dominance of the “Washington Consensus,” which changed the way the international financial institutions (especially the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and governments made policies on foreign aid from the 1980s through the 1990s. Proponents of the Washington Consensus placed efficiency of the economy as their highest objective. Further, they did so under the assumptions that efficiency was good and that they understood mechanisms of economics sufficiently to identify good, efficient policies (Williamson, 1993 , p. 1330). Though pursuing equity or more fair distribution of resources had often been considered a goal of policy, supporters of the Washington Consensus were not concerned with equity; at best, they saw the possibility that some improvements in equity could come about “as a byproduct of seeking efficiency objectives” (Williamson, 1993 , p. 1329). As Dani Rodrik ( 2006 ) sardonically recounted:

Any well-trained and well-intentioned economist could feel justified in uttering the obvious truths of the profession: get your macro balances in order, take the state out of business, give markets free rein. “Stabilize, privatize, and liberalize” became the mantra of a generation of technocrats who cut their teeth in the developing world and of the political leaders they counseled. (p. 973)

Ultimately, the popularity of the Washington Consensus waned as it failed to produce positive economic growth in developing countries. By 2005 , the World Bank issued a careful analysis of the failures of its own policies that implemented the neoclassical economics of the Washington Consensus (Zagha & Nankani, 2005 ). The failure of the Washington Consensus cast attention back onto other liberal, but not neoclassical, political economy theories, specifically those dealing with how institutions can resolve externalities and other forms of market failure in an otherwise liberal global political economy.

In the wake of the decline of the Washington Consensus and the financial crisis beginning in 2008 , special mention of the scholarship of Susan Strange must be made. Strange, who could be classified, broadly, as a liberal in her understanding of markets and efficiency, strongly criticized the neoclassical position. She understood that markets did not function in the absence of good governance. Indeed, in 1986 and again in 1998 she analyzed a global political economy in which states had ceded control to markets, with the expectation of disastrous results for volatility and the health of the global economy (Strange, 1986 , 1998 ). She saw clearly the danger of fast-moving financial flows in a global political economy in which no government provided the appropriate regulation to ensure fair dealing and protect against the negative externalities that result when rational self-interested agents pursue their self-interest in the absence of such regulation. No one has been overseeing the global financial system, and the result has been, as Strange ( 1986 ) predicted, serious harm.

Strange’s contributions have only been confirmed in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 , in response to which liberal theorists have been challenged to critically reformulate the ideal and real relations between market forces and state planning. Landmark works in the empirical study of financial crisis and contemporary inequality such as Picketty ( 2014 ) and Tooze ( 2018 ) are essential contributions to the study of the contemporary salience of finance and financial crisis in contemporary global capitalism. Indeed, as John Ikenberry ( 2018 ) observes, the liberal international order faces grave challenges from resurgent economic nationalisms and social conservatisms. In addition to this 21st-century political challenge, the liberal tradition has historically been most broadly and deeply challenged by Marxian theories of global political economy.

Marxian Global Political Economy

The third major school of thought in international political economy has been Marxism, along with several “neo”-variants. Karl Marx, along with Friedrich Engels and (later) Vladimir Lenin, is considered the progenitor of a political economy that emphasizes the role class plays in society. Although the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the systemic changes within the People’s Republic of China have demonstrated the failures of Marxian-influenced policies, Marxian thought offers a useful critique of the structure of the global political economy by shedding light on capitalism and the production of inequities.

Marx, writing in the mid- 19th century , combined philosophical investigation of political economy with activism. He witnessed a world that was being changed by industrial development, in which the workers were increasingly subject not just to the authority of the state but also to the control of the capitalist. Marx adapted Hegel’s dialectic to the material world, seeing the contradictions within capitalism driving change, which he expected to lead to revolutionary transformation of society. This notion of the dialectic and the teleological view of history—that these contradictions would inexorably lead to a communist society as the predictable end state and (ironically, somewhat self-contradictorily) that this unavoidable revolutionary change should be fomented—has not been borne out and, arguably, has been contradicted. The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels, 1983 ) remains, though, the clearest explication of Marx’s view.

In terms of the development of political economy, Marx broke with the liberals in his identification of the sphere of production, as opposed to the sphere of exchange, as the focal point of sociopolitical and economic dynamics. Market mechanisms were relatively fixed, but the politics of production—whether it is on land used to grow food or on the shop floor—determined the nature and dynamics of the social order. Though there are several “Marxian” variations of the broad sweep of history, we basically find a succession of stages that are differentiated by the nature of the ownership of the means of production. Early history is characterized as an era of “primitive capitalism” without specialization where all members of the human community were essentially equal in the tasks they pursued and the status they held. A long period characterized by slavery followed, where some people subjugated others to the status of chattel and appropriated their labor power directly. This system is inefficient and comes to be plagued with high costs involved in maintaining order and overseeing production. In Europe, the period of slavery is followed by feudalism, where direct ownership of individuals ends, but peasants are nonetheless tied to the land, which itself can be owned. The peasant thus owes the owner of the land a level of labor dues. The transition to capitalism emerges when the social relations of production (the social overlay of the feudal system in this latest stage) become impediments to further development. Feudalism’s limits lead to changes that find landowners failing to control their charges, and peasants taking up a new position in the economy. They are stripped of their land and put in a position where they must sell their labor power in the market for a wage.

Marx extended this concept of alienated labor in two ways that are important for the study of global political economy. First, he emphasized the alienation of labor as the definitive element in the capitalist system. The division of labor in an industrializing society meant that workers would have no choice but to sell their labor power as a commodity to survive. In doing so, the worker sells his power of production to the capitalist. The alienation of the worker from his own labor gives a special viciousness to the class relations that characterize the capitalist mode of production (Marx, 1983a ). Second, Marx examined how the alienation of labor led to the accumulation of “surplus value,” the profit that accrued to the capitalist when the price of a good exceeded the wages the capitalist paid the laborer for its production. The wage laborer would only earn enough for their subsistence, but the capitalist would be able to take in the surplus, which would be much greater than that needed for the capitalist’s subsistence (Marx, 1983b ).

Vladimir Lenin’s tract, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism—A Popular Outline , brought Marxian thought into the global political economy. Lenin extended Marx’s predictions, showing how capitalism would spread around the world, leading to an ultimate contradiction of inter-imperialist conflict. As capitalism became more advanced, the accumulation of surplus value led to the concentration of ownership through the rise of monopolies. Bank ownership became concentrated and closely interconnected with the interests of monopoly capital. According to Lenin, the results were monopolistic “finance capital.” Further, the connections between capital and banks were “completed” by tight connections between each of these and the state. The consequence, Lenin wrote, was a shift in capitalism. “Under old capitalism, when free competition prevailed, the export of goods was the most typical feature. Under modern capitalism, when monopolies prevail, the export of capital has become the typical feature” (Lenin, 1982 , p. 62). He argued that the “superabundance of capital” in the advanced capitalist countries drove exports, and capitalism spread throughout the world. Furthermore, imperialism was the natural result, as finance capital moved to expropriate the raw materials of the colonies. The result was the immiseration of the masses, both within the advanced capitalist countries and abroad, “for uneven development and wretched conditions of the masses are fundamental and inevitable conditions and premises of this mode of production” (Lenin, 1982 , pp. 62–63 [emphasis in the original]). The ultimate contradiction between capitalism and monopoly and the push for domination eventually must lead, Lenin stated, to inter-imperialist rivalry and, finally, the decay of monopoly capitalism.

Where Marx saw the spread of the capitalist mode of production to all societies as inevitable, other critical scholars were concerned that capitalism was creating not models of itself but of a new kind of social order. Dependency scholars argued that instead of facilitating the growth of capitalism in the third world, capitalist and imperialist actions were leading to a system where real capitalism could not possibly develop. What we were witnessing, they argued, was “the development of underdevelopment” (Gunder Frank, 1969 ). Dependency scholars argued that capitalist interests often strengthened precapitalist forms of exploitation. Hence, large landowners would solidify their position in a society by reaping the benefits of a captive population of laborers in a system more akin to feudalism than capitalism, but without the internal contradictions that would lead to its transformation. The ability of one society to warp the subsequent developmental path of another, given the incentives that trade relations with capitalists offered, was described by Sweezy ( 1942 ), Baran ( 1957 ; Baran & Sweezy, 1969 ), Gunder Frank ( 1969 ), Cardoso and Faletto ( 1979 ), dos Santos ( 1970 ), and Amin ( 1976 ). Amin, for example, examined how accumulation differs in the core of developed countries and the periphery of developing countries. In the wealthier core, the masses are essentially co-opted through the production and availability of the consumer goods needed to satisfy them. In the periphery, production is focused on luxury goods and exports, thereby further enriching the dominant classes and leaving the needs of the masses unfulfilled and the people marginalized.

Marxist scholars considered this analysis to be flawed by its concern for actions taking place in the sphere of exchange (trade between core and periphery) and not the sphere of production (more class-based analysis). Supporters of the original Marxian formulation like Laclau ( 1971 ) and Warren ( 1973 ) produced critical analyses of dependency arguments. Brenner ( 1977 ) labels dependency and related schools of thought “neo-Smithian” in orientation and therefore fundamentally un-Marxian.

Dependency scholarship was quite popular given its ability to explain both underdevelopment and the failure of class politics to grow along traditionally identified Marxist paths. In the 1970s, Immanuel Wallerstein brought dependency and a desire to reconceptualize the developmental paths of the advanced industrial states in the long-term approach of Fernand Braudel ( 1982–1984 ) together to form world-systems analysis. Wallerstein ( 1974 ) dated the origins of the development of the “capitalist world-economy” to the long 16th century . He was able to add political and cultural conditions to the essentially materialist analyses of longer-term critical history. Wallerstein ( 2004 ) understands a world-economy as

A large geographic zone within which there is a division of labor and hence significant internal exchange of basic or essential goods as well as flows of capital and labor. A defining feature of a world-economy is that it is not bounded by a unitary political structure. Rather, there are many political units inside the world-economy, loosely tied together in our modern world system in an interstate system. And a world-economy contains many cultures and groups—practicing many religions, speaking many languages, differing in their everyday patterns. This does not mean that they do not evolve some cultural patterns, what we shall be calling a geoculture. It does mean that neither political nor cultural homogeneity is to be expected or found in a world-economy. What unified the structure most is the division of labor which is constituted within it. (p. 23)

Wallerstein also came under critical scrutiny for keeping “capitalism” at the core of his analysis. Scholars like Chase-Dunn and Hall ( 1991 , 1997 ) sought to push the elements of world-system analysis to earlier eras in explicitly comparative work. Others, like Gunder Frank and Gills, argued for the abandonment of “capitalism” as the core of global developmental concerns, and argued for the development of a world system history that would cover the last 5,000 years of human history (Gunder Frank, 1998 ; Gunder Frank & Gills, 1993 ). All these works are essentially emancipatory in their intent. They share the view that poverty is a central problem, that global inequalities should be addressed, and that remedies must be adopted.

Italian communist Antonio Gramsci continues to have a major influence on the field of international political economy. Gramsci, who was influenced by Marx, Lenin, and other socialist and communist thinkers, contributed the concept of Gramscian hegemony to the study of IPE. While in liberal and realist IPE, hegemony simply refers to a single state having a preponderance of power, Gramsci looked at the complex interconnection between the material and productive base of the social order (the structure) and philosophy, ideas, culture, and relationships (the superstructure). Hegemony is in place “in so far as it creates a new ideological terrain, determines a reform of consciousness and of methods of knowledge” (Gramsci, 1988 , p. 292). For Gramsci, a class is hegemonic when it is able to lead through the consent of those it controls, because of this complex set of dominant “ethico-political” ideas, and through force, in terms of ownership and organization of economic activity. Giovanni Arrighi ( 1994 ) summarizes Gramsci’s definition of hegemony as

the capability of a state to lead the system of states itself in a desired direction—that is, to set the rules for the system in ways that buttress rather than undermine the world power of the hegemon. [. . .] (p. 365)

Here we should remember Gramsci’s point that intellectual and moral leadership (Machiavelli’s consent) is as critical to the effective exercise of hegemony internationally as coercion pure and simple is at the national level. Henk Overbeek ( 1994 ), however, emphasizes that hegemony in the global political economy has to do more with dominance of a class—specifically of the capitalist class.

Another important Gramscian term is “historical bloc,” which refers to the dynamic dialectical relationship between the material and productive base and the superstructure of ideas. As Robert W. Cox ( 1999 , p. 5) explains, “Gramsci was less concerned with the historic bloc as a stable entity than he was with historical mutations and transformations, and with the emancipatory potential for human agency in history.” In short, the relationship between civil society and the state within any historical bloc will embody both the existing hegemony and the seeds of counterhegemonies. “Civil society was the ground that sustained the hegemony of the bourgeoisie but also that on which an emancipatory counterhegemony could be constructed” (Cox, 1999 , p. 3).

Like Gramsci, Karl Polanyi ( 2001 ) saw society resisting the negative consequences of capitalist markets. In The Great Transformation , he argued that a “double-movement” resulted from social forces pushing back against the aspects of a market-driven society. Polanyi also saw the relationship between society, markets, and the state as historically situated, with technological and policy innovations leading to changes in society. Polanyi traced the creation of the self-regulating market economy through the commodification of land, labor, and specie, social changes that made the industrial revolution and the rise of “haute finance” possible.

Both Gramsci and Polanyi have influenced a cohort of critical IPE scholars, including Robert Cox ( 1996 ), Stephen Gill ( 2003 ; see also Gill & Mittelman, 1997 ), Craig Murphy ( 2005 ), James Mittelman ( 2004 ), and Mark Rupert ( 2000 ). Gramscian global political economy has been particularly relevant to the study of globalization and the spread of liberal markets around the world. These approaches to global political economy suggest that the existing tension in the world between the antiglobalizers and the proglobalizers has at root a dialectical contestation between hegemonic and counterhegemonic groups. These authors focus on the importance of groups and other nonstate actors, as well as states, since civil society within the global political economy includes a variety of types of actors.

The global financial crisis of 2008 provided the impetus for Marxian-influenced scholarship focusing on globalization. Marxian analyses of global financial crises differ from their liberal counterparts in emphasizing the structural nature of these periodic crises. That is, Marxian theorists tend to locate the tendency for economic crisis in the very nature of the system, as a necessary and (relatively) predictable feature, impossible to explain by reference to the individual decision-making of leaders and firms alone (Harvey, 2010 ; Krippner, 2011 ).The tensions between a liberal and a Marxian analysis of capitalism’s crisis tendencies are displayed in the substantive critique of the liberal approach in Crashed by Adam Tooze ( 2018 ; see Anderson, 2019 ). Some of this research, as discussed in the section “ Postcolonial Approaches ,” emphasizes the consequences of capitalist crises in postcolonial societies (e.g., Krishna, 2009 ).

Feminist Global Political Economy

Despite the differences among them, the three most common approaches to global political economy (liberal/neoliberal, mercantile/economic nationalist, and Marxian) tend to assume that the buying, selling, and production of goods and services are what matter. Important actors in the analysis, be they firms and consumers, states, or classes, are all engaged in buying and selling, producing goods and services for sale, and seeking wealth (Tickner, 1992 ). Feminist approaches to global political economy highlight two important points that are usually overlooked. First, people are gendered, and gender is generally understood hierarchically, with men and activities that are understood as masculine (competing, making money) being valued more highly than women and women’s activities. Second, productive (i.e., market-based) activities are not the only things that happen in society; rather, society needs, but, again, does not value as highly, the activities of the reproductive economy—the unpaid work necessary to create a home life, provide leisure activities, and care for family members. These reproductive activities are almost universally associated with feminine characteristics and are not considered by mainstream global political economy analyses. As V. Peterson ( 2005b ) argues, however, understanding the analytical implications of gendered hierarchies provides a more complete understanding of processes of the global political economy (see also Griffin, 2007 ). The approach by J. K. Gibson-Graham ( 2006 ) to decentering and reconceptualizing the capital-labor relation opens an analytical space for feminist theorizations of GPE along these lines.

The marketization of the global political economy, including the integration of emerging market economies, also has important gender implications. As some scholars note, these changes are not necessarily simply good or bad. On the negative side, the informalization of labor—the changing nature of available jobs from regular, full-time employment to part-time, temporary, or independent contracting arrangements—adds significant uncertainty to households’ economic stability. The effect is more pronounced on women’s work and on the feminized jobs held by men. On the positive side, globalization has also brought increasing equity in educational opportunities and increased access to some jobs (Benería, Floro, Grown, & MacDonald, 2000 ; Peterson, 2005b ). Similarly, Jacqui True, in a case study of the Czech Republic, finds that “the commodification of gender is facilitating the extension of markets,” with the dual effect of “empower[ing] women as much as it subjects them to new forms of discipline and market civilization” (True, 1999 , p. 363).

Consequently, a further contribution of feminist GPE has been to challenge the pervasive association of the study of the global or the totality with a masculine drive to dominance. Instead of combatting the impulse to study the global by turning to a study of microrelations, feminist GPE has developed theories and methods for understanding gender as a mechanism of producing and rationalizing the inequalities within global capitalism (Bhattacharya, 2017 ; Fraser, 2013 ; Tepe-Belfrage, 2016 ). Hozic and True ( 2016 ) bring together a variety of feminist and queer perspectives on global financial crisis, highlighting how these concerns cannot be consigned to the margins of the study of global economic processes.

Postcolonial Approaches

A burgeoning literature in postcolonial political economy has emerged through critical conversation with traditional IPE. This literature mobilizes a critique of Eurocentrism in political economy and foregrounds the structural impact that colonial histories continue to exert on global economic life (Dirlik, 1994 ; Grovogui, 2011 ; Lowe, 2015 ; Shilliam, 2018 ). Another key contribution of postcolonial theory to political economy has been its critique of Eurocentric epistemologies and its attention to the knowledge traditions and economic formations of the non-West (Agathangelou & Ling, 2003 ; Blaney & Inayatullah, 2010 ; Ling, 2000 ; Shilliam, 2012a , 2020 ). Robbie Shilliam ( 2009 , 2012b ), for example, theorizes about Atlantic slavery and its consequences for our understanding of liberal and Marxian IPE.

Debates continue over whether Marxian theory is essential to a postcolonial project of emancipation and self-determination (Rao, 2017 ). On the one hand, the reading of Marx by Dipesh Chakrabarty ( 2008 ) has inspired new possibilities for the critique of the coloniality and the racism of capitalism’s history and present (e.g., Persaud & Sajed, 2018 ; Tilley & Shilliam, 2018 ). On the other hand, Hobson ( 2012 , 2013a , 2013b ) argues that Marx and Lenin’s theoretical edifice is too indebted to a colonial worldview in which the West represents the model of future progress and social development. An influential Marxian critique of postcolonial studies can be found in Chibber ( 2013 ). Notwithstanding these tensions, scholars continue to draw inspiration from both postcolonial theory and Marxian theory to construct critiques of contemporary global capitalism. For example, Anievas and Nişancıoğlu ( 2015 ) have brought the sensibilities of the Marxian tradition together with postcolonial theory to highlight the irreducibly global or intersocietal history of capitalism, and Khalili ( 2020 ) takes stock of the colonial echoes that resonate within global trade flows from the standpoint of the Arabian Peninsula.

Upon entering the third decade of the 21st century , three rapidly evolving areas of scholarship, discussed briefly in this section, are likely to continue to be of interest and grow in importance: China and the transition of the neoliberal world order, queer global political economy, and “precarity” of the global workforce.

Prior to the 1990s, research on China generally focused on processes of development and modernization of a peripheral country. As China made initial changes to its economy and began to participate more in global trade, new questions emerged. Jacobson and Okensenberg ( 1990 ), for example, examined the impact of the participation of China, a developing country with a command economy, in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (it had been a member since 1980 ) and the likely consequences for the global economic order of its signing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. At the end of the 20th century , China’s economy underwent a major transformation, including the growth of its private sector, reliance on exports, and full engagement with international trade and finance. These changes spurred assessment of the IPE implications of China as a rising power. This research is consistent with mainstream IPE schools of thought, framing China’s opening and market reforms in terms of realist/economic nationalist expectations of conflict between China and the liberal capitalist countries (Layne, 2018 ) or liberal expectations that China will end up conforming to Western liberal capitalist norms (Deudney & Ikenberry, 2018 ; Ikenberry, 2009 ).

The new trend in the research moves away from this “binary orthodoxy” (De Graaff, ten Brink, & Parmar, 2020 ). Instead, this trend provides empirical and theoretical analysis of how China reshapes but does not necessarily remake global capitalism—not overturning global capitalism and the neoliberal order but rather exerting influence on and shaping its contours (Hung, 2009 , 2015 ). This stream of research avoids theorizing China as a unitary actor and instead looks closely at the global consequences of how the Chinese economy is organized domestically and in the global context. Hung ( 2008 ) assesses the overaccumulation of capital in China resulting from the state’s decentralization of regulatory authority, local actors’ overinvestment in productive capacity, and widespread underconsumption. China has been able to maintain strong growth and an export-driven trade policy in this unstable circumstance only because of overconsumption and debt in the United States. Other scholars have explored how China’s trade policy is both influenced by and promoted by transnational networks that Chinese elites have entered (de Graaff, 2020 ; Huo & Parmar, 2020 ). Disruption of neoliberal globalization is another important theme. For example, Hopewell ( 2016 ) argues that Chinese inconsistency—sometimes supporting and sometimes contesting neoliberal rules—is the root of its disruptiveness. Ironically, by supporting liberal rules, China shines a light on the “hypocrisy” of illiberal trade policies of the United States and other Western countries. Weinhardt and ten Brink ( 2020 ) suggest that explanation for this inconsistency can be found in domestic differences in the structure and degree of government intervention in sectors. McNally ( 2020 ) identifies the source of instability in the contradictions of Sino-capitalism, described as both neoliberal and neostatist and as organized top-down by the state and bottom-up through networks of entrepreneurs.

The second trend, queer global political economy, can be seen within the broader category of queer international relations (IR) theory (Weber, 2015 ), while overlapping substantially with feminist and other critical approaches. Queer IR theory uncovers and problematizes the political consequences of assumptions, grounded in naturalized cultural practices, of binary constructions of identity—of assuming the world is divided into male and female or similarly into normal and abnormal, heterosexual and homosexual, or other taken-for-granted dichotomies. Applied to the substantive domain of global political economy, this approach focuses attention on “heteromasculine and cissexist assumptions and biases” and “the differential—and productive—impact of processes and policies associated with neoliberal globalization sexualized and gendered subjects, practices, and kinship relations” (see article “Queer International Relations”). Peterson ( 2014 ), for example, explores “global householding,” a term that encompasses the many transborder processes of social reproduction necessary to sustain families and the wider society, especially in the Global North. These processes include “marriage/partnership, earning income, managing daily life, securing childcare, eldercare, healthcare, and education, acquiring domestic ‘help,’ relocating for retirement” (p. 606). Smith ( 2016 ) investigates how neoliberal policy responses to global financial crises disadvantage those whose lives differ from that of the presumed “normal” family, a husband and a wife and their children. “Imaginaries” of the family, she argues, reproduce the neoliberal economic order.

The growing “precarity” of the global workforce, the subject of the third new direction of research discussed here, has emerged as a grave side effect of the processes of globalization, a reality acknowledged by all the different schools of IPE. Guy Standing ( 2016 ) has introduced and popularized the concept of the “precariat,” which he regards as a new stratum of the working class marked by an extreme lack of job security and basic benefits like healthcare and paid time off. This class, according to Standing, represents a growing contingent of the global workforce, a verdict corroborated by many empirical studies, especially from a comparative political economy perspective (Agarwala, 2013 ; Kalleburg, 2018 ; Mosoetsa, Stillerman, & Till, 2016 ). This framing of the issue of precarious labor, however, is not without its critics. With a properly global analytic lens, some argue, precarity does not appear to be a new phenomenon at all but a condition that has characterized the Global South since its inception and which now threatens the North as well (Scully, 2016 ). Moreover, as Ritu Vij ( 2019 , p. 504) has argued, the idea of precarity as it is popularly conceived rests on “the pathologization of vulnerability,” an ideological process which normalizes a liberal individualist political economy and understands nonliberal forms of life as “abject.”

It is also worth mentioning a trend that seems to have petered out. At the time the original 2010 version of this article was drafted, communitarianism seemed to be a promising, emerging stream of normative research that would address problems of global capitalism. Largely associated with the work of Amitai Etzioni ( 1991 , 2004 ), communitarianism can be seen as a countertheory to the idea that liberal markets are natural and that men and women are naturally economically rational, self-interested agents. Etzioni’s communitarianism does not eschew liberal economics wholly, nor does he advocate a loss of individual freedoms; instead, he looks for a via media in which the interests of individuals are balanced by the interest of the communities of which they are a part. The local, national, and global political economies are in essence communities. The connection to community seems to draw on the feminist idea of an ethic of care (Tronto, 1987 ). William Galston ( 2002 ), in a similar vein, argues for a rejection of both socialist and laissez-faire economics in favor of an approach that he calls “mutualism”; the policy implementation would be a “progressive market strategy,” in which policies would promote “moderate self-interest, regard for others, and internalized norms” of responsibility. Communitarian global political economy, however, failed to gain traction, perhaps because other, more normatively progressive critical approaches came to the fore.

GPE Research Relevant to COVID-19

As this article was being prepared for publication ( May 2020 ), it became difficult to ignore the severe implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the global political economy. The robust literature dealing with the global history of pandemics and the dangers that a new pandemic would pose in a world marked by increasingly intensifying processes of economic globalization are highlighted here.

A review of GPE’s engagements with the history of global pandemics reveals a wide variety of analytical lenses, including descriptive accounts of the impact of environment on society and more politically focused accounts of the differential impacts suffered by different peoples. The account by McNeil ( 1998 ) of the history of plagues is notable for its emphasis on intersocietal transmission, highlighting how the world’s peoples have been interconnected long before the emergence of 20th-century globalization. The work of Pirages ( 1995 , 1997 , 2007 ) deserves special mention for its wide historical and geographical scope and its sensitivity to the intersections between international politics, infectious disease transmission, and the coordinated social responses (or lack thereof) that have been implemented historically to combat the worst consequences of infectious disease. Work by Paul Farmer ( 2004 ) seeks to highlight how the social toll of pandemics largely depends on preexisting power relations and inequalities in society, which he theorizes in terms of “structural violence.” Another key scholar of pandemics is Mike Davis ( 2005 ), whose study on the Avian Flu offered a prescient warning of the political–economic threat of a new global pandemic. Davis ( 2020 ) has published an analysis of COVID-19 in a periodical issue focused on the pandemic (NLR Editors, 2020 ).

A special issue of Review of International Political Economy on Political Economies of Global Health, edited by Susan K. Sell and Owain D. Williams ( 2020b ), appeared online just a few months before the first reported cases of COVID-19. The issue focuses on global capitalism’s effects on the health of the world’s people across multiple scales and through multiple processes. Neoliberalism and policies insisting on free markets, Sell and Williams ( 2020a ) argue, have negative effects on global health through “regimes and institutions in areas such as trade and investment policy, austerity programs, pharmaceutical and food governance, and the rules that support globalized production and consumption” (p. 1). Though this observation focuses on health more generally, the global, national, and local responses to pandemics are certainly a part of the larger global health system. Three of the articles are especially relevant to the GPE aspects of pandemics and other instances of the spread of infectious disease. Rebecca J. Hester and Owain D. Williams ( 2020 ) ground their exploration of the political economy of the “somatic-security industrial complex,” upon influenza and its movement around the world. Stefan Elbe and Christopher Long ( 2020 ) explore global assemblages of medical molecules that become valuable for biodefense against disease outbreaks, bioterrorist attacks, and the like. João Nunes ( 2020 ) examines Brazil’s domestic political economy within the neoliberal order, the precarity of health workers’ jobs, and the consequences for Brazil during the Zika virus outbreak.

Much of the salient research on the global politics of infectious diseases prior to COVID-19 has occurred in fields of global health governance (Huang, 2014 ; Youde, 2018 ) and security studies (Davies, 2008 ; Price-Smith, 2009 ), and these studies will likely prove essential for future pandemic-related knowledge production in GPE. New materialist approaches that privilege the impact of nonhuman life processes will likely contribute in important ways to pandemic research (White, 2015 ).

Though COVID-19 was only recognized as a global pandemic in March 2020 , the sheer scope of the crisis resulted in immediate scholarly attention. Notable analyses of the pandemic and its reverberations in the global economy include the world-systems approach of Silver and Payne ( 2020 ) and a short but generative series of contributions to the journal of Foreign Policy (Walt et al., 2020 ). Certainly, many scholars of GPE will be turning to these contributions and constructing their own in responses to the global crisis of COVID-19.

Links to Digital Materials

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Penn State University Libraries

Pl sc 412: international political economy (world campus).

• Getting Started
• Exploring Topics
• Search Strategies Exercise
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Term Paper Overview

• You will write a term paper on a relevant topic of interest to you.  The basic idea is for you to apply a theory or small set of theories to an issue in international political economy to drive predictions regarding the likely course of events over the next 5-10 or 10- 20 years. You will work on the paper in stages and be graded on your work over the course of the semester.  After submitting a rough draft, you will review another student’s paper and get peer feedback on your draft.

Term Paper Stages

1.  Research Paper Topic : You will write a short paragraph outlining the general topic of your research paper. General topics include, but are not limited to, trade relations, hegemony, the exchange rate, development and globalization. You will then describe the specific subtopic you are interested in. If, for example, your general topic is globalization, some subtopics might be sweatshops or the effect of globalization on the environment.

2.  Research Question: You will write one short paragraph that first presents your initial research question. Make sure that your research question asks what factors, variables, or conditions affect some aspect of your subtopic and focuses on cause-and-effect relationships.

• You should avoid descriptive and prescriptive questions.  The former leads to research papers that simply describe a process or an event, while the latter results in research papers that tell us what we can or should do to change, fix, or prevent some undesirable situation.
• For example, if your subtopic is the effect of globalization on the environment under the general topic of the globalization, an appropriate research question might be “under what conditions will countries cooperate to reduce pollution?” Inappropriate research questions might be “which states are the biggest polluters?” and “what should be done to reduce pollution?”

3.  Bibliography: You will submit a preliminary bibliography that should consist primarily of scholarly works associated with your research topic, such as books, journal articles, and other published studies that have been subjected to peer review. University presses, as well as many other reputable publishers, produce peer-reviewed books.

• American Political Science Review
• American Journal of Political Science
• International Organization
• International Studies Quarterly
• World Politics International
• Journal of Political Economy
• Your bibliography must follow the guidelines found in the American Political Science Association’s Style Manual for Political Science.  (See the Citations page of this guide for link.)

4.  Theory Overview : The reading you do will allow you to become acquainted with different theories (or "models" as they are often called) about the phenomenon that you’re interested in. Review the most prominent or compelling theories. If there are competing theories, highlight their distinguishing factors.

5.  Thesis Statement : You will write one or two sentences that represent your thesis statement. This thesis statement should be a concise summary of your research paper’s argument or analysis. In other words, the thesis statement summarizes your findings, your predictions and your argument. It is “the punch line” of your paper and what follows fills out and supports this statement.

6.  Detailed Outline : You will provide a detailed outline of the various sections of your research paper. These sections may include, but are not limited to, the introduction (including your thesis statement), theory review, analysis, and conclusions.

7.  Rough Draft : You will submit a rough draft of your research paper for peer review. This draft does not have to be perfect. It simply represents your first attempt to put your thoughts in final form. However, the more work you put into this rough draft, the more likely it is that you will receive useful feedback from the peer review. You will get full credit for submitting the draft. (I will not be grading content at this point.) If you do not submit the rough draft you WILL NOT get any credit for completing a peer review.

8.  Peer Review:   You will provide constructive feedback on one classmate’s rough draft.  Using track changes and the insertion of comments, offer as much constructive criticism on your classmate’s paper as possible.  Constructive criticism is criticism that is intended to improve the paper and often identifies solutions to problems in a positive and productive way.  You might want to think about this peer review as a valuable opportunity to improve your own writing; as you edit and comment upon your classmate's work, you might discover things that you should or should not do in future essays and research papers. You will not get credit for this portion if you do not submit a rough draft yourself.

9.  Final Paper: Your final paper must be between 6-8 pages in length, double-spaced with 12-point Times New Roman font and 1-inch margins. Your paper must also include proper parenthetical citations and bibliography, following the guidelines found in the American Political Science Association’s Style Manual for Political Science.  (See the Citations page of this guide for link.)   Please upload your paper in Word (or Pages), not pdf.

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Topics in Comparative Political Economy

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PS 210: Topics in Comparative Political Economy

Translating substantively significant political economy issues into researchable research problems is a challenge. The course objective will be to consider how these topics can provide the basis for research projects and dissertations in comparative politics and comparative political economy. Each class will explore both the substance of a particular problem to identify significant issues and the relation of those issues to questions of general interest in political economy and political science. The final course assignment will be a research paper that can be a master’s essay, an elaborated research design such as a draft dissertation prospectus, or a dissertation chapter.

Topics will include:

· The politics and the transformation of finance: Has the evolution of finance affected how governments and business interact. Was the transformation an inevitable result of technology and globalization or a policy choice? Was the crisis of 2008 the first financial collapse of the digital age?

o Financial systems, once principally national and rooted around domestic deposits and investments, have been transformed. They are now both market-based and often global in character. Arguably this transformation, facilitated by Information Technology tools, is at the root of the financial collapse of 2008, and more generally has consequences for the politics of domestic economic governance and strategies for growth.

· Green Growth, Energy Transformations, and the Climate Debate: Domestic and International Issues

o While the Climate problem is “global”, the solutions will lie in major part in the transition of domestic energy systems from high carbon low efficiency to high efficiency low carbon. That transformation will be costly in the short run and does not produce automatic or evident economic gain. Why do some countries pursue strategies to transform energy systems while others do not? Can Green Sustain Growth?

· The Third Globalization and the Commodity Trap: Can Wealthy Countries Stay Rich in the face of emerging market competition? There are an array of questions here.

o The decomposition of production and the transformation of services force us to reconsider the logic of value creation and, consequently, the dynamics of political economy. As production is outsourced and off-shored, where are jobs and who captures the value? Nationally rooted vertically integrated companies were the focus of debate and concern in the 20 th century. They have given rise to cross national production net works. Services once feared to be the black hole of advanced economies have, enabled by information technology, become productivity drivers. For advanced countries these developments have created at once both a commodity trap potentially limiting productivity and wage increases, and escapes from that trap. These developments have also influenced the distribution of gains from growth.

§ For emerging markets we consider how the fragmentation of production and the evolution of finance creates diverse points of entry into the global economy. What are the politics of Rapid Innovation Based Growth that has been central to growth strategies?

§ For advanced countries the expanded competition across the value chain makes everything seem like a commodity and puts pressure on prices. Advanced country work forces face competition, thus, from increasingly diverse and skilled work forces in a variety of places.

– Are there escapes from the commodity trap? How can firms create and capture value in the advanced countries?

– The jobs producing an Apple product may be in China, but the value add is in the US. But can workers in the US share in that Bonanza?

§ Will cloud computing, which is an ICT evolution of significance and not just an advertising slogan, make the commodity trap worse? Or will it provide advance countries a way out? The answer is not in the technology, but in the policies and politics of adoption and diffusion.

· Technology, International Trade, and Policy: What drives jobs, income and wealth?

o What policies can affect the distributive outcomes of the transformation of work?

· Globalization with Borders: Will borders evaporate, change meaning, or be redrawn in a era of globalization? Is the world flat, or was Christopher Columbus right?

o Europe and the Euro Crisis: Have politics created an economic crisis, or, conversely, has economic misjudgment generated a political debacle? Does the current crisis have implications for our understanding of the origins and evolution of the European community?

o How does a nation’s regional neighborhood matter to its political and economic trajectory?

o Are tribal challenges to state authority in Iraq and the Catalan challenge to Spanish authority part of the same larger story.

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How to Write a Political Economy Essay Step by Step

If you have an upcoming political economy essay, just follow this simple guide. You can also use it as a checklist as you go to make sure that you don’t forget anything.

What is a Political Economy Essay?

Political economy refers to the relationship between - you guessed it - politics and economy. It focuses on how they are connected, and more specifically, it examines how economies behave in various political conditions such as democracy, socialism, and communism. It also demonstrates how different government groups share resources. Here’s a basic guide on how to write effectively about this subject.

Where Should I Start?

First of all, do your reading. You’ll need to know what you’re talking about in order to write an essay worthy of a high grade. When you’re ready, write out a solid first draft that includes all of your main points and arguments. If you quote anyone in your text, you have to explicitly state the name of the author, the year the excerpt was originally published, and the page number where you got the quote from. For example, (Harrison 1999: 164).

If you are going to include an abstract, it should serve as a snapshot of what your paper is about and what conclusion you came to. Keep it limited to one short paragraph that very briefly summarizes your overall paper. Organize your essay according to the following structure:

1) Introduction

Your introduction should clearly state your thesis (the main argument you pose) and briefly summarize the subject matter in your paper. While doing this, it’s important to draw the reader in to want to read the rest. A great way to do this is to find something unusual or interesting about your topic, and pose a question to the reader based on that fact. For example, describe the political system at hand and question the origin or future consequences of an intriguing aspect within of your topic and how it impacts the economy.

The body of your political economy essay must expand on your main ideas, outlining your arguments in detail, and providing sufficient support against any likely counterarguments. You should attempt to demonstrate without a doubt the validity of your claim and provide a thought-provoking examination of your selected form of government and the various ways it influences the economy and vice versa.

Each paragraph should completely or at least partially communicate one idea or argument. You may include graphs, charts, and statistical data to support your argument. Be sure to properly cite all materials taken from outside sources according to your professor’s expectations. Your grade will depend on it!

3) Conclusion

Whatever your findings may be, and whether they prove your original claim or disprove it, you should clearly state the result of your efforts in researching and writing about your topic. You may reiterate the most essential findings to bring closure to your argument. A simple prediction of what the future holds for your examined political economy might also serve as a good way to bring your paper to an end.

Strategy for Composition

Since your topic falls in the realm of political economy, you should approach your paper not as an informative essay, but an explanatory essay that attempts to make sense of the relationship between the economy and its overarching political system and its laws. If you state any fact that is central to your topic, attempt to explain to the reader what significance you can draw from that fact since you chose to include it in your paper.

Finishing Touches

Be sure that your paper coincides with whatever academic style your professor asked you to use (MLA or APA). Edit your paper rigorously for errors, and go through a series of drafts until the structure and content of your paper is worthy of an ‘A’. If possible, ask a classmate or friend to read through it and provide suggestions for improvement. Use this outline as a guide as you write your political economy essay and you can’t go wrong.

Essay on Politics: Topics, Tips, and Examples for Students

Defining What is Politics Essay

The process of decision-making that applies to members of a group or society is called politics. Arguably, political activities are the backbone of human society, and everything in our daily life is a form of it.

Understanding the essence of politics, reflecting on its internal elements, and critically analyzing them make society more politically aware and let them make more educated decisions. Constantly thinking and analyzing politics is critical for societal evolution.

Political thinkers often write academic papers that explore different political concepts, policies, and events. The essay about politics may examine a wide range of topics such as government systems, political ideologies, social justice, public policies, international relations, etc.

After selecting a specific research topic, a writer should conduct extensive research, gather relevant information, and prepare a logical and well-supported argument. The paper should be clear and organized, complying with academic language and standards. A writer should demonstrate a deep understanding of the subject, an ability to evaluate and remain non-biased to different viewpoints, and a capacity to draw conclusions.

Now that we are on the same page about the question 'what is politics essay' and understand its importance, let's take a deeper dive into how to build a compelling political essay, explore the most relevant political argumentative essay topics, and finally, examine the political essay examples written by the best essay writing service team.

Politics Essay Example for Students

If you are still unsure how to structure your essay or how to present your statement, don't worry. Our team of experts has prepared an excellent essay example for you. Feel free to explore and examine it. Use it to guide you through the writing process and help you understand what a successful essay looks like.

How to Write a Political Essay: Tips + Guide

A well-written essay is easy to read and digest. You probably remember reading papers full of big words and complex ideas that no one bothered to explain. We all agree that such essays are easily forgotten and not influential, even though they might contain a very important message.

If you are writing an essay on politics, acknowledge that you are on a critical mission to easily convey complicated concepts. Hence, what you are trying to say should be your main goal. Our guide on how to write a political essay will help you succeed.

Conduct Research for Your Politics Essay

After choosing a topic for the essay, take enough time for preparation. Even if you are familiar with the matter, conducting thorough research is wiser. Political issues are complex and multifaceted; comprehensive research will help you understand the topic better and offer a more nuanced analysis.

Research can help you identify different viewpoints and arguments around the topic, which can be beneficial for building more impartial and persuasive essays on politics. Sometimes in the hit of the moment, opposing sides are not able to see the common ground; your goal is to remain rational, speak to diverse audiences, and help them see the core of the problem and the ways to solve it.

In political papers, accuracy and credibility are vital. Researching the topic deeply will help you avoid factual errors or misrepresentations from any standpoint. It will allow you to gather reliable sources of information and create a trustworthy foundation for the entire paper.

If you want to stand out from the other students, get inspired by the list of hottest essay ideas and check out our political essay examples.

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Brainstorm Political Essay Topics

The next step to writing a compelling politics essay is to polish your thoughts and find the right angle to the chosen topic.

Before you start writing, generate fresh ideas and organize your thoughts. There are different techniques to systematize the mess going on in your head, such as freewriting, mind mapping, or even as simple as listing ideas. This will open the doors to new angles and approaches to the topic.

When writing an essay about politics, ensure the topic is not too general. It's always better to narrow it down. It will simplify your job and help the audience better understand the core of the problem. Brainstorming can help you identify key points and arguments, which you can use to find a specific angle on the topic.

Brainstorming can also help you detect informational gaps that must be covered before the writing process. Ultimately, the brainstorming phase can bring a lot more clarity and structure to your essay.

We know how exhausting it is to come up with comparative politics essay topics. Let our research paper writing service team do all the hard work for you.

Create Your Politics Essay Thesis Statement

Thesis statements, in general, serve as a starting point of the roadmap for the reader. A political essay thesis statement outlines the main ideas and arguments presented in the body paragraphs and creates a general sense of the content of the paper.

Creating a thesis statement for essays about politics in the initial stages of writing can help you stay focused and on track throughout the working process. You can use it as an aim and constantly check your arguments and evidence against it. The question is whether they are relevant and supportive of the statement.

Get creative when creating a statement. This is the first sentence readers will see, and it should be compelling and clear.

The following is a great example of a clear and persuasive thesis statement:

 'The lack of transparency and accountability has made the World Trade Organization one of the most controversial economic entities. Despite the influence, its effectiveness in promoting free trade and economic growth in developing countries has decreased.'

Provide Facts in Your Essay about Politic

It's a no-brainer that everything you will write in your essay should be supported by strong evidence. The credibility of your argument will be questioned every step of the way, especially when you are writing about sensitive subjects such as essays on government influence on economic troubles. 

Provide facts and use them as supporting evidence in your politics essay. They will help you establish credibility and accuracy and take your paper out of the realm of speculation and mere opinions.

Facts will make your essay on political parties more persuasive, unbiased, and targeted to larger audiences. Remember, the goal is to bring the light to the core of the issue and find a solution, not to bring people even farther apart.

Speaking of facts, many students claim that when they say ' write my essay for me ' out loud, our writing team is the fastest to respond and deliver high-quality essays meeting their trickiest requirements.

Structure Your Political Essay

Your main goal is to communicate your ideas to many people. To succeed, you need to write an essay that is easy to read and understand. Creating a structure will help you present your ideas logically and lead the readers in the right direction.

Sometimes when writing about political essay topics, we get carried away. These issues can be very emotional and sensitive, and writers are not protected from becoming victims of their own writings. Having a structure will keep you on track, only focusing on providing supported arguments and relevant information.

Start with introducing the thesis statement and provide background information. Followed by the body paragraphs and discuss all the relevant facts and standpoints. Finish it up with a comprehensive conclusion, and state the main points of your essay once again.

The structure will also save you time. In the beginning, creating an outline for essays on politics will give you a general idea of what should be written, and you can track your progress against it.

Revise and Proofread Your Final Politics Essay

Once every opinion is on the paper and every argument is well-constructed, one final step should be taken. Revision!

We know nothing is better than finishing the homework and quickly submitting it, but we aim for an A+. Our political essay must be reviewed. You need to check if there is any error such as grammatical, spelling, or contextual.

Take some time off, relax, and start proofreading after a few minutes or hours. Having a fresh mind will help you review not only grammar but also the arguments. Check if something is missing from your essays about politics, and if you find gaps, provide additional information.

You had to spend a lot of time on them, don't give up now. Make sure they are in perfect condition.

Effective Political Essay Topics

We would be happy if our guide on how to write political essays helped you, but we are not stopping there. Below you will find a list of advanced and relevant political essay topics. Whether you are interested in global political topics or political science essay topics, we got you covered.

Once you select a topic, don't forget to check out our politics essay example! It will bring even more clarity, and you will be all ready to start writing your own paper.

Political Argumentative Essay Topics

Now that we know how to write a political analysis essay let's explore political argumentative essay topics:

• Should a political party take a stance on food politics and support policies promoting sustainable food systems?
• Should we label Winston Churchill as the most influential political figure of World War II?
• Does the focus on GDP growth in the political economy hinder the human development index?
• Is foreign influence a threat to national security?
• Is foreign aid the best practice for political campaigning?
• Does the electoral college work for an ideal political system?
• Are social movements making a real difference, or are they politically active for temporary change?
• Can global politics effectively address political conflicts in the modern world?
• Are opposing political parties playing positive roles in US international relations?
• To what extent should political influence be allowed in addressing economic concerns?
• Can representative democracy prevent civil wars in ethnically diverse countries?
• Should nuclear weapons be abolished for the sake of global relations?
• Is economic development more important than ethical issues for Caribbean politics?
• What role should neighboring nations play in preventing human rights abuse in totalitarian regimes?
• Should political decisions guide the resolution of conflicts in the South China Sea?

Political Socialization Essay Topics

Knowing how to write a political issue essay is one thing, but have you explored our list of political socialization essay topics?

• To what extent does a political party or an influential political figure shape the beliefs of young people?
• Does political influence shape attitudes toward environmental politics?
• How can individuals use their own learning process to navigate political conflicts in a polarized society?
• How do political strategies shape cultural globalization?
• Is gender bias used as a political instrument in political socialization?
• How can paying attention to rural communities improve political engagement?
• What is the role of Amnesty International in preventing the death penalty?
• What is the role of politically involved citizens in shaping minimum wage policies?
• How does a political party shape attitudes toward global warming?
• How does the federal system influence urban planning and attitudes toward urban development?
• What is the role of public opinion in shaping foreign policy, and how does it affect political decision making
• Did other countries' experiences affect policies on restricting immigration in the US?
• How can note-taking skills and practice tests improve political engagement? 
• How do the cultural values of an independent country shape the attitudes toward national security?
• Does public opinion influence international intervention in helping countries reconcile after conflicts?

Political Science Essay Topics

If you are searching for political science essay topics, check our list below and write the most compelling essay about politic:

• Is environmental education a powerful political instrument? 
• Can anarchist societies provide a viable alternative to traditional forms of governance?
• Pros and cons of deterrence theory in contemporary international relations
• Comparing the impact of the French Revolution and World War II on the political landscape of Europe
• The role of the ruling political party in shaping national policies on nuclear weapons
• Exploring the roots of where politics originate
• The impact of civil wars on the processes of democratization of the third-world countries
• The role of international organizations in promoting global health
• Does using the death penalty in the justice system affect international relations?
• Assessing the role of the World Trade Organization in shaping global trade policies
• The political and environmental implications of conventional agriculture
• The impact of the international court on political decision making
• Is philosophical anarchism relevant to contemporary political discourse?
• The emergence of global citizenship and its relationship with social movements
• The impact of other countries on international relations between the US and China

Final Words

See? Writing an essay about politic seems like a super challenging job, but in reality, all it takes is excellent guidance, a well-structured outline, and an eye for credible information.

If you are stressed out from juggling a hundred different course assignments and have no time to focus on your thesis, our dissertation writing services could relieve you! Our team of experts is ready to take over even the trickiest tasks on the tightest schedule. You just have to wish - ' write my essay ' out loud, and we will be on it!

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What Is Political Economy?

Understanding political economy.

• History and Development

Political Economy in Academia

• Modern Applications

The Bottom Line

• Government & Policy

Political Economy Definition, History, and Applications

Political economy is an interdisciplinary branch of the social sciences. It focuses on the interrelationships of individuals, governments, and public policy.

Political economists study how economic theories such as capitalism , socialism , and communism work in the real world. Any economic theory is a means of directing the distribution of a finite amount of resources in a way that benefits the greatest number of individuals.

These ideas can be studied both theoretically and as they are actually used. Public policy that is created and implemented derive from these economic theories. Political economists study both the underlying roots of these policies and their results.

Key Takeaways

• The field of political economy involves the study of how economic theories such as capitalism or communism play out in the real world.
• As political parties come to and leave power, economic policy often changes due to the ideology and goals of the party in power.
• Those who study political economy seek to understand how history, culture, and customs impact an economic system, and vice versa.
• Global political economy studies how political forces shape global economic interactions.
• The rise of globalism and global trade means that political economy of one country can impact both the economy and the politics of others.

Investopedia / Zoe Hansen

Political economy is a branch of social science that studies the relationship that forms between a nation's population and its government when public policy is enacted. It is, therefore, the result of the interaction between politics and the economy and is the basis of the social science discipline.

Those who research the political economy are called political economists. Their study generally involves the examination through a sociological, political, and economic lens of how public policy, the political situation, and political institutions impact a country's economic standing and future.

In a wider sense, political economy was once the common term used for the field we now call economics . Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all used the term to describe their theories. The shorter term "economy" was substituted in the early 20th century with the development of more rigorous statistical methods for analyzing economic factors.

Types of Political Economy

There are several notable types of political economies:

• Socialism: This type of political economy promotes the idea that the production and distribution of goods and wealth are maintained and regulated by society, rather than a particular group of people. The rationale behind this is that whatever is produced by society is done so because of those who participate, regardless of status, wealth , or position. Socialism aims to bridge the gap between rich and poor, eliminating the ability of individuals or groups to control the majority of power and wealth.
• Capitalism: This theory advocates profit as a motive for advancement and the ability of free markets to regulate and drive the economy on their own. The idea behind capitalism is that private individuals and entities are driven by their own interests—they control production and distribution, set prices, and create supply and demand .
• Communism: Individuals often confuse communism with socialism, but there is a distinct difference between these two theories. Communism was a theory developed by Karl Marx , who felt that capitalism was limited and created a big divide between rich and poor. He believed in shared resources, including property. Unlike socialism, however, under communism production and distribution are overseen by the government.

Political economy may draw upon sociology, economics, and political science to define how government, an economic system, and politics influence each other.

History and Development of Political Economy

The roots of political economy as we know it today go back to the 18th century. Scholars during the period studied how wealth was distributed and administered between people. Some of the earlier works that examined this phenomenon include those by Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill .

Antoine de Montchrestien

But the term is probably best ascribed to the French writer and economist, Antoine de Montchrestien. He wrote a book called "Traité de l'économie politique" in 1615, in which he examined the need for production and wealth to be distributed on an entirely larger scale—not in the household as Aristotle suggested. The book also analyzed how economics and politics are interrelated.

Smith was a Scottish philosopher, economist, and writer who is commonly referred to as the father of economics and of the political economy. He wrote about the function of a self-regulating free market in his first book, which was called "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." His most famous work, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (or " The Wealth of Nations ," for short) helped shape classical economic theory. It was considered the foundation for the field of study by future economists.

John Stuart Mill

The Englishman Mill combined economics with philosophy. He believed in utilitarianism —that actions that lead to people's goodwill are right and that those that lead to suffering are wrong. In essence, he believed that economic theory and philosophy were needed, along with social awareness in politics, to make better decisions for the good of the people. Some of his work, including "Principles of Political Economy, Utilitarianism," and "A System of Logic" made him one of the most important figures in politics and economics.

Importance of Political Economy

Political economy studies both how the economy affects politics and how politics affect the economy . As political parties come to and leave power, economic policy often changes in a country in accordance with the ideology and goals of the party in power.

Political changes can impact many areas of the economy, which can in turn impact elections and government policies. These areas include:

• Monetary and fiscal policy
• Food security
• Global trade
• Labor supply, demand, and crises
• Gross domestic product (GDP)
• Financial inequality
• Disaster management
• Environmental stability

As the economies of more countries become interconnected through globalism and international trade, the politics of one country can have a strong impact on the economy of another. Understanding the relationship between political power and economic decisions in one country can help other countries predict how their own economies will be impacted.

Understanding political economy can also help a country's economy become more resilient. If the government leaders in power at any given moment are forward-thinking, they can try to put laws and policies in place that create the greatest possibility for economic stability and growth, regardless of changing political power.

Political economy is still a widely used term that describes any government policy that has an economic impact.

Political economy has become an academic discipline of its own. Many major institutions offer the study as part of their political science, economics, and sociology departments.

Political economists conduct research to determine how public policy influences behavior, productivity, and trade. This work helps them establish how money and power are distributed between people and different groups. They may study specific fields such as law, bureaucratic politics, legislative behavior, the intersection of government and business, and regulation.

The study may be approached in any of three ways:

• Interdisciplinary studies: The interdisciplinary approach draws on sociology, economics, and political science to define how government institutions, an economic system, and a political environment affect and influence each other.
• New political economy: This approach studies actions and beliefs, and seeks to make explicit assumptions that lead to political debates about societal preferences. The new political economy combines the ideals of classical political economists and newer analytical advances in economics and politics.
• International political economy: Also called global political economy, which is slightly different, this approach analyzes the link between economics and international relations. It draws from many academic areas including political science, economics, sociology, cultural studies, and history. The international political economy concerns how political forces like states, individuals, and institutions affect global economic interactions.

Modern Applications of Political Economy

Modern applications of the political economy involve the study of later philosophers and economists, such as Karl Marx.

As mentioned above, Marx became disenchanted with capitalism as a whole. He believed that individuals suffered under regimented social classes, where one or more individuals controlled the greater proportion of wealth.

Under communist theories, this would be eradicated, allowing everyone to live equally while the economy functions based on the ability and needs of each participant. Under communist regimes, resources are controlled and distributed by the government.

Socialism vs. Communism

Many people confuse socialism and communism. It's true there are some similarities—notably, that both stress bridging the gap between rich and poor, and that society should relegate equilibrium among all citizens.

But there are inherent differences between the two. While resources in a communist society are owned and controlled by the government, individuals in a socialist society hold property. People can still purchase goods and services under socialism, while those who live in a communist society are provided with their basic necessities by the government.

What Does Political Economy Mean?

The term "political economy" refers to a branch of social sciences that focuses on relationships between individuals, governments, and public policy. It is also used to describe the policies set by governments that affect their nations' economies.

What Is the Primary Concern of Political Economy?

The main concerns of political economy are the relationship between governments and individuals, and how public policy affects society. These are determined through the study of sociology, politics, and economics.

What Are the Characteristics of Political Economy?

Some of the characteristics or themes of a political economy include the distribution of wealth, how goods and services are produced, who owns property and other resources, who profits from production, supply and demand, and how public policy and government interaction impact society.

Who Coined the Term "Political Economy"?

Adam Smith is generally considered the father of economics and of the political economy. But the term is generally ascribed to French economist Antoine de Montchrestien, who wrote the book "Traité de l'économie politique," which translates to the treaty of the political economy.

Political economy is a branch of the social sciences that studies the relationships between individuals, governments, and public policy. It examines how the realm of politics impacts the economy and how the economy impacts politics.

As political parties change, a country's economic policy often changes as well, based on the ideology and goals of the party in power. This can impact areas of the economy such as monetary and fiscal policy, food security, labor crises, rising inequality, GDP, and disaster management. These changes in the economy can in turn prompt new political laws, policies, or election outcomes.

The rise of globalism and international trade means that the politics of one country can have a strong impact on the economy of another. Understanding political economy can help countries become more resilient in the face of global economic changes.

Oxford Bibliographies. " Political Economy ."

Paganelli, Maria Pia. "Adam Smith and the Origins of Political Economy,"  Social Philosophy and Policy , vol. 37, no. 1, 2020, pp. 159–169.

International Relations and Security Network. " A Discourse on Political Economy ."

John Mill. "Principles of Political Economy." Longmans, Green, and Company, 1848.

Shleifer, Andrei, and Robert W. Vishny. "The Politics of Market Socialism,"  Journal of Economic Perspectives , vol. 8, no. 2, 1994, pp. 165-176.

International Monetary Fund. " What Is Capitalism? "

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. " Communism: Karl Marx to Joseph Stalin ."

Adam Smith Institute. " The Wealth of Nations ."

Nicholas Capaldi. "John Stuart Mill: A Biography." Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Joseph Garnier. "Notes et Petits Traités Faisant Suite aux Eléments de L'economie Politique." Garnier frères, 1858.

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. " Adam Smith (1723—1790) ."

International Monetary Fund. " The Political Economy of Economic Policy ."

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Political Science Essay Topics

Get Inspired by 200 Political Science Essay Topic Ideas

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Published on: May 8, 2023

Last updated on: Jan 31, 2024

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Political science is a fascinating and ever-evolving field that seeks to understand the complex workings of politics. As a student of political science, writing essays on political science topics can be an excellent way to deepen your knowledge.

But finding an excellent topic for your essay is often the most difficult part. Don’t worry if you’re stuck at choosing a topic - delve into our list of topics to find inspiration!

In this blog, we've compiled a list of almost 200 political science essay topics. This list covers a wide range of topics and subfields within political science. These thought-provoking essay topics will inspire you to explore new ideas and develop a deeper understanding of the subject. 

So let’s delve into it!

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Public Policy and Administration Essay Topics

• The role of public policy in promoting sustainable development.
• An analysis of the impact of social media on public policy decision-making.
• The challenges of implementing public policy in diverse cultural contexts.
• A comparative study of public healthcare policies in different countries.
• The role of public-private partnerships in promoting economic development.
• An evaluation of the effectiveness of public policy in addressing climate change.
• The impact of globalization on public policy and administration.
• The challenges of balancing individual rights and public safety in policy-making.
• An analysis of the role of bureaucracy in public policy administration.
• The ethical challenges facing public policy decision-makers and administrators.

Political Theory and Political Philosophy Essay Topics

• The concept of justice in political philosophy
• The views on power in political philosophy
• The relationship between democracy and capitalism in political theory.
• The role of civil disobedience in democratic societies: a philosophical perspective.
• The relationship between individual freedom and social responsibility in political theory.
• The role of the state in ensuring social justice in modern democracies.
• A critical analysis of the concept of sovereignty.
• The relationship between ethics and politics in the work of Aristotle.
• A comparative study of the political thought of Plato and Machiavelli.
• Feminist political theory and its role in promoting gender equality in democratic societies.

Comparative Politics Essay Topics 

• What are the different electoral systems used in democratic countries?
• The role of political parties in democratic governance: a comparative analysis.
• The impact of religion on politics in different countries: a comparative study.
• The challenges of democratic consolidation in transitional societies: a comparative perspective.
• A comparative analysis of the welfare state in different countries.
• The role of civil society in democratic governance: a comparative study.
• A comparative study of the political systems of federal and unitary states.
• The impact of historical legacies on contemporary political systems: a comparative analysis.
• A comparative analysis of the parliamentary and presidential systems of government.
• The impact of globalization on political systems: a comparative study.

Political Economy Essay Topics

• The impact of globalization on economic inequality: a critical analysis.
• The role of the state in economic development: a comparative study.
• A comparative study of capitalist and socialist economic systems.
• The relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability.
• The impact of technological innovation on economic development.
• The role of multinational corporations in shaping global economic governance.
• A comparative study of the economic policies of different political regimes.
• The impact of financialization on the global economy.
• The relationship between trade liberalization and economic growth: a critical analysis.
• The role of international organizations in shaping global economic governance.

American Politics and Government Essay Topics

• The impact of political polarization on American democracy.
• Government influence in the economics of the US.
• Culture wars as the most important political issue in contemporary United States
• The challenges of federalism in a diverse and complex society.
• A critical analysis of the role of interest groups in American politics.
• The impact of media on American politics and public opinion.
• A comparative study of the voting systems used in different American states.
• The role of the Electoral College in American presidential elections.
• The impact of money on American politics: a case study of a recent election.
• A critical analysis of the role of the Constitution in shaping American politics and society.

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International Relations and Diplomacy Essay Topics

• The impact of globalization on international relations.
• A comparative study of the foreign policies of major powers.
• The role of diplomacy in conflict resolution: a case study of a recent conflict.
• The impact of economic interdependence on international relations.
• The role of international law and diplomacy in global governance.
• The role of the United Nations in promoting international peace and security.
• The role of soft power in shaping international relations
• The impact of nationalism on international relations. 
• The relationship between technology and diplomacy in the 21st century.
• The threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear war

Essay Topics About Regional Politics

• How has the European Union navigated the challenges posed by Brexit and the rise of right-wing populism?
• What role does the African Union play in promoting regional integration and economic development on the continent?
• How successful has ECOWAS been in promoting peace and security in West Africa?
• What challenges does ASEAN face in promoting economic integration and regional cooperation in Southeast Asia?
• How has SAARC contributed to regional stability and economic development in South Asia?
• What impact has the BRICS group had on global economic governance and geopolitics?
• What are the implications of China's increasing influence in the Asia-Pacific region for regional stability and security?
• How have the member states of Caricom worked together to promote economic integration and development in the Caribbean?
• The evolution of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and its role in the Middle East?
• How have regional organizations and powers responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, and what lessons can be learned from their experiences?

Political Science Education and Career Essay Topics

• The benefits of studying political science for a career in public service.
• The job prospects for political science graduates.
• The impact of technology on the future of political science careers.
• A comparative analysis of political science programs offered by different universities.
• The role of internships in preparing political science students for a career in public service.
• Diversity and inclusion in political science education and careers.
• The salaries and benefits of political science professionals.
• The role of professional associations in supporting political science education and careers.
• The skills required for a successful career in political science.
• The impact of globalization on political science education and careers.

Essay Topics About Political Parties and Elections 

• The impact of financial influence in politics on democratic elections.
• The role of political parties in shaping democratic elections.
• The impact of social media on political campaigns and elections.
• A critical analysis of voter suppression in recent elections.
• The role of interest groups in shaping election outcomes.
• A comparative study of primary election systems used in different states.
• The impact of political advertising on voter behavior.
• A critical analysis of the role of political action committees in shaping election outcomes.
• The impact of gerrymandering on democratic representation.
• The role of charismatic leadership in elections

Essay Topics About Political Ideologies

• An analysis of the major political ideologies: liberalism, conservatism, socialism, and fascism.
• The role of ideology in shaping public policy.
• A critical analysis of the relationship between democracy and different political ideologies.
• The impact of globalization on the spread of political ideologies.
• A comparative analysis of feminist and gender-based political ideologies.
• The role of religion in shaping political ideologies.
• A critical analysis of the intersection of race and political ideologies.
• A study of the political ideologies behind different social movements.
• The role of political ideologies in shaping political parties and elections.
• The impact of political ideologies on political violence and terrorism.

Essay Topics About Human Rights and Justice

• A critical analysis of the role of international law in promoting human rights and justice.
• The impact of globalization on human rights and justice.
• A comparative study of the human rights and justice systems in different countries.
• The role of the United Nations in promoting human rights and justice.
• A critical analysis of the intersection of human rights and social justice movements.
• The impact of human rights abuses on democratic governance.
• The role of civil society organizations in promoting human rights and justice.
• A comparative study of restorative and retributive justice systems.
• The impact of technology on the promotion and protection of human rights.
• The role of the media in promoting human rights and justice.

Essay Topics About Gender and Politics

• Representation of women in politics in different countries.
• The impact of gender on voting behavior and political participation.
• A critical analysis of the intersection of race and gender in politics.
• The role of gender in shaping public policy.
• A comparative analysis of the political representation of women in different regions.
• The impact of social media on the gendered nature of political discourse.
• A critical analysis of the gendered dimensions of political violence and conflict.
• The role of gender in shaping political leadership styles.
• A comparative study of the impact of gender quotas on political representation.
• The role of feminist movements in shaping political agendas.

Essay Topics About Environmental Politics

• The impact of climate change on global politics.
• The role of international organizations in shaping environmental policies.
• A comparative study of the environmental policies of different countries.
• The impact of environmental policies on economic development.
• The relationship between environmental justice and social justice.
• The role of civil society organizations in shaping environmental policies.
• Market-based vs command-and-control environmental policies.
• The impact of the media on shaping public opinion on environmental issues.
• A critical analysis of the relationship between environmental politics and global governance.
• The role of science in shaping environmental policies.

Essay Topics About Media and Politics 

• The role of media in shaping political discourse.
• The impact of social media on political communication and participation.
• A comparative analysis of media systems and their impact on political outcomes.
• The role of media in shaping public opinion and electoral outcomes.
• An analysis of the relationship between media ownership and political bias.
• The impact of fake news and disinformation on political processes and outcomes.
• A comparative study of media regulation in different countries.
• The role of investigative journalism in holding political leaders accountable.
• The impact of media consolidation on political diversity and representation.
• The relationship between media and democracy.

Essay Topics About Political Culture and Identity

• The relationship of political culture on democratic governance.
• The role of cultural identities in shaping political behavior.
• The impact of cultural diversity on political processes and outcomes.
• A critical analysis of the role of nationalism in shaping political identities.
• The impact of populism on political culture and identity.
• The role of gender and sexuality in shaping political identities.
• A critical analysis of the relationship between religion and politics.
• The impact of migration on cultural identities and political participation.
• The role of art and culture in shaping political identity and activism.
• The relationship between language and political identity.

Essay Topics About Political Geography and Geopolitics

• A study of the impact of geography on political boundaries and territorial disputes.
• A comparative analysis of political systems in different regions of the world.
• The impact of natural resources on geopolitical relations and conflicts.
• A critical analysis of the role of global institutions in shaping geopolitical outcomes.
• The impact of infrastructure development on geopolitical relations.
• A comparative study of the influence of colonialism on modern political geography.
• The role of geography in shaping economic development policies.
• The impact of migration on political geography and geopolitics.
• The impact of climate change on political geography and geopolitics.
• The role of technological innovation in shaping political geography and geopolitics.

Essay About Political Leadership and Decision-making

• A critical analysis of the qualities and characteristics of effective political leaders.
• The impact of leadership styles on decision-making in politics.
• A comparative analysis of leadership styles and their impact on political outcomes.
• The role of emotions and intuition in political decision-making.
• The relationship between power and leadership in politics.
• The impact of charismatic leadership on political influence.
• The decision-making process in crisis situations in politics.
• The role of communication skills in effective political leadership and decision-making.
• A comparative analysis of the decision-making process in democratic and authoritarian systems.
• The rise of global populist leadership.

Essay Topics About War and Peace

• The causes and consequences of war in the modern era.
• The effectiveness of different conflict resolution mechanisms.
• The role of international law in regulating armed conflicts and promoting peace.
• The role of peacekeeping operations in managing conflicts.
• The impact of new technologies on the dynamics of modern warfare.
• A comparative study of different approaches to peacebuilding and their effectiveness.
• The role of diplomacy in preventing and resolving conflicts.
• A study of the relationship between economic interdependence and peace.
• The role of media in shaping public perceptions of war and peace.
• The impact of environmental factors on the risk of conflict and the prospects for peace.

Political Argumentative Essay Topics

• Should the United Nations have the authority to intervene in sovereign nations to prevent human rights abuses?
• Is democracy the best form of government, or are there other viable alternatives?
• Should the government have the right to regulate free speech in order to protect against hate speech and incitement to violence?
• To what extent should the government be involved in regulating the economy?
• Should the electoral college be abolished in favor of a popular vote for presidential elections?
• Is democracy the ideal political system for every country in the world?
• Should political candidates be required to release their tax returns in order to run for office?
• Is political correctness a threat to free speech and academic freedom?
• Should the government be responsible for ensuring access to affordable healthcare for all citizens?
• Should the right to bear arms be protected, or should gun ownership be more strictly regulated for public safety?

Political Science Persuasive Essay Topics

• The government should provide universal healthcare to all citizens.
• Elected officials should be required to disclose their financial interests and conflicts of interest.
• Renewable energy sources should be prioritized over fossil fuels to combat climate change.
• The electoral college should be abolished in favor of a popular vote for presidential elections.
• Voter ID laws should be eliminated to ensure fair and equal access to the ballot box.
• The United States should increase its investment in education and reduce its military spending.
• The minimum wage should be raised to a living wage in order to combat poverty.
• The United States should adopt a policy of open borders and allow for more immigration.
• The government should regulate social media platforms to combat the spread of misinformation and hate speech.
• The United States should take a more active role in combating human rights abuses and promoting democracy around the world.

How to Choose a Political Science Topic for Your Essay

Now that you have read some good political science essay topic ideas, you must be wondering which one to choose. This is because with so many options to choose from, it can be overwhelming to find the right topic.

Here are some tips to help you choose a topic:

• Choose a Topic that Interests you: 

It is essential to choose a topic that you are passionate about. This will make the research and writing process more enjoyable and engaging. 

• Do Your Research: 

Conduct preliminary research on each of your potential topics to see if there is enough literature and data available. You can use academic databases, books, and reputable websites to gather information.

• Consider your Audience: 

Think about your audience and what they might find interesting and relevant. Choose a topic that is not only relevant to your course but also to the broader political context.

• Narrow Down your Focus: 

Once you have a list of potential topics, narrow them down to a few that are more specific and manageable. You can do this by asking yourself questions such as, "What is the purpose of my essay?" and "What is my main argument?"

• Keep it Relevant: 

Choose a topic that is current and relevant to the present political landscape or the course you are studying. This will help keep your essay engaging and informative.

• Consult with your Instructor: 

Finally, if you are unsure about your topic or have questions about the assignment, don't hesitate to consult with your instructor. They can offer valuable insights and advice on how to approach your topic and structure your essay.

To Wrap it Up,

Political science is a fascinating field that offers a lot of topics for students to study. It's important to choose a topic that is both interesting to you and relevant to the course material. 

With the list of 200 essay topics provided above, you can get an inspiration for your own essay. Moreover, by following the tips for choosing a topic, you can narrow down your options to find a manageable and engaging topic.

Struggling with your political science essay? Our expert essay helpers are here to assist you every step of the way. Trust our political science essay writing service to deliver top-notch papers tailored to your needs.

And for an even smoother writing experience, don't forget to explore our AI essay writer tool .

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Essay on Political Economy

Students are often asked to write an essay on Political Economy in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Political Economy

What is political economy.

Political economy is about how countries manage their money, resources, and government rules. It looks at how these things affect people and their jobs. It combines politics, which is about government, and economy, which is about money and trade.

History of Political Economy

Political economy today.

Now, political economy helps us see how decisions by leaders can change our lives. It checks if these decisions are fair and good for everyone. It also looks at how countries trade with each other.

Why It Matters

Understanding political economy is important because it affects our daily life. If a country’s political economy is strong, people can have better jobs and live well. If it’s weak, it can lead to problems like poverty.

250 Words Essay on Political Economy

Understanding political economy, government’s role.

The government has a big job in political economy. It decides how money is made and spent in a country. For example, it can collect taxes from people and businesses. Then, it uses this money to build schools, roads, and hospitals. The government also makes laws that guide how businesses work and how people buy and sell things.

People and Markets

People are important in political economy too. They work jobs, earn money, and buy things they need or want. All these actions create what we call a market. The market is like a big store where lots of buying and selling happen. Prices can go up or down based on how many things are available and how much people want them.

Global Connections

Countries don’t just keep to themselves; they trade with each other. This means they buy and sell goods and services across the world. This part of political economy shows how countries depend on each other. They might trade because one country has something the other needs, like oil or food.

In conclusion, political economy is a field that studies how a country handles its wealth and power. It includes the government, people, markets, and international trade. Each part is linked, and changes in one area can affect the others. Understanding political economy helps us know more about the world and how we all fit together.

500 Words Essay on Political Economy

Political economy is a study that combines politics and economics. It looks at how governments affect the economy and how economic theories influence political actions. Imagine you have a big jar of cookies. Political economy would be the rules your family sets for who gets how many cookies and why. It’s about who has the power to decide, and how that affects everyone’s share.

The Origins of Political Economy

Governments make rules that can change how goods and services are made and shared. They can tax people, which is like taking some cookies from everyone to pay for things all people use, like schools and roads. They can also decide how much of something, like oil or wheat, can come into or go out of a country. This is like saying you can only trade a certain number of cookies with your neighbor.

Economic Theories in Politics

There are different ideas about the best way for economies to work. Some people think the government should be very involved. This is like having strict rules about who can take cookies and when. Others believe the market should decide without much government control, which is like letting everyone decide for themselves when to take a cookie. Politicians use these ideas to make policies that they think will make the economy better.

Global Political Economy

Why political economy matters.

In conclusion, political economy is about how governments and economies work together. It’s like a game where the rules affect how everyone plays and what they get. By learning about political economy, we can better understand the world around us and how decisions made by leaders impact our daily lives.

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

Happy studying!

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Essays on Political Economy

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Argumentative essay should the penny be eliminated, essay on capitalism and communism, the controversy of equilibrium unemployment, the key characteristics of the free enterprise system, why is capitalism better than communism, the impact of inflation reduction act on the international economic stage, inflation reduction act in the frame of macroeconomic challenges, exploring the implications of the inflation reduction act, topics in this category.

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25 Political Economy Essay Topics For Great Writing

In most cases, the professor will provide you with an essay topic and requirement, but he or she may require that you come up with an essay topic related to the subject. You cannot choose any topic that comes into your mind. The professor is particularly interested in certain aspects of your essay, not just the topic, so you need to take your time before you choose a topic. Here we have scoured all over and have listed some of the greatest topics in political economy.

But first, Understand what is required of you

The first process of picking the right political economic essay is to understand the research question. What exactly does your professor needs? Can you find enough academic resources to support your thesis or your argument? These questions will allow you to understand the concept in the subject and to focus on the topic.

Understand the Value of research

When it comes to political economic essays, a thorough research will make all the difference in points earned. The political economy essay will mainly focus on the current issues, some of which may not be published yet or have not been on the academic research. In addition to this, changes in political economy occur almost on daily basis, and as a good writer, you need to be pinpoint the present problem to support your argument, and your thesis statement. This is one of the reason it is recommended that you buy university essays from academic writers who are ready to put their times researching current issues.

25 political economy Essay topic for great writing

Below is a list of the latest topic you can use in your political economic essay..

• 1. Political economy and Tourism
• 2. How does monetary fund promote country stability?
• 3. Inflation targeting in an open economy
• 4. What is the political effect of the global financial crisis?
• 5. Indicators and impact of unemployment in the country?
• 6. Ethics and political economy
• 7. Financial issues caused by global warming
• 8. The logic and the impact of ignorance and fiscal illusion
• 9. A comparison of macro normative theories used to rank state of the world
• 10. Effects of voter’s ignorance on public policies
• 11. The political economy of media
• 12. State capacity in progressing areas
• 13. Specifics in a financial crisis
• 14. Specifics in global imbalances
• 15. Global capital flows
• 14. Capital accumulation in the U.S
• 15. Deficit issues
• 16. Progressive issues in an economy
• 17. Redefining poverty in a country
• 18. What is shadow banking
• 19. Determinants of Political-economic Policy
• 20. The future of inframarginal analysis
• 21. The sustainability of the capitalist economic system
• 22. Alternative to democracy and liberal form of government
• 23. Impact of terrorism on international oil prices
• 24. Political economy perspective in sociology
• 25. Specifics in the labor share crisis

These are just some of the few political economic topics you can choose from, but it is always important to relate them to your instructors’ requirement. He or she may require that you come up with a comparative essay or an argumentative topic. Whichever the case, make sure you understand the purpose of the essay. Buying university essays may be your best options if you are unsure of the topic, structure or do not understand the instructor’s requirements.

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• 150 Political Essay Topics

Whether it’s for a political science class, government class, or history class, you will eventually have to write a political essay. A political essay explores the various explanations for particular events that have transpired in the past and the different effects of those events on society and politics.

Political essays can be pretty challenging for students because the depth and scope of the subject matter can be quite vast. Additionally, a lack of knowledge about the workings of government and the political process can make writing a political essay quite difficult.

Fortunately, we’ve created a handy guide detailing essential components of political essay writing. Additionally, we’ve included 150 political essay topics students can use to get started.

The Basic Components of a Political Essay

Regardless of the topic’s complexity, political essays all have the same essential components – an introduction, a thesis, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Students can create an assertive and well-crafted political essay by understanding how these components work together.

The Introduction

The introduction of a political essay should grab the reader’s attention and give them an overview of the main points covered in the essay. An excellent way to do this is by starting with a provocative statement or posing a thought-provoking question. A great example of a political essay introduction could sound something like:

“In a world where the powerful seem to always get their way, is there any hope for democracy?”

The Thesis Statement

The thesis statement is the most critical component of a political essay. It is the main argument or points that the essay will be making. Everything else in the essay should support the thesis statement. A thesis statement is probably the most challenging part of writing a political essay for many students because it can be challenging to distill the essay’s main argument into one or two sentences.

Some tips for writing a strong thesis statement include:

• Make sure that the thesis statement is arguable. In other words, it should be something that someone could reasonably disagree with.
• Be as specific as possible. A thesis statement that is too vague will make it difficult to write a strong essay.
• Keep it short and to the point. A thesis statement should be no more than one or two sentences.

Great examples of a political essay thesis statement include:

“The current state of democracy is in danger due to the rise of populist leaders who exploit the fears of the people.”

“The government should do more to combat the rising inequality in society by implementing policies that help the working class.”

The Body Paragraphs

The body paragraphs of a political essay are where the essay’s main argument will be fleshed out in detail. Each body paragraph should focus on one specific point that supports the thesis statement. When writing body paragraphs, it is essential to:

• Start with a topic sentence that introduces the main point
• Support the topic sentence with evidence from credible sources.
• Connect the evidence back to the thesis statement.
• Repeat for each body paragraph.

The Conclusion

The conclusion of a political essay should sum up the main points of the essay and leave the reader with a solid and clear understanding of the argument being made. A great conclusion should:

• Restate the thesis statement in different words.
• Summarize the main points of the essay.
• Leave the reader with something to think about.

Some examples of final thoughts to end a political essay could be:

“It is clear that democracy is under threat from populist leaders. However, there is still hope as long as people remain engaged and fight for their rights.”

“The current state of democracy may be troubling, but it is nothing new. Throughout history, there have always been those who seek to undermine it. The key is to remain vigilant and to stand up for what we believe in.”

The Do’s and Don’ts of Political Essay Writing

While the tips above will help you write a solid political essay, there are also some things to avoid if you want your essay to be successful. Here are some dos and don’ts of writing a political essay:

Do research your topic inside and out.

A well-informed essay is always more persuasive than one that simply regurgitates the opinions of others. When researching, always use reliable sources and take good notes so you can easily refer back to them later.

Don’t forget to proofread and edit your work.

No matter how well-written and informative an essay is, if it is full of typos and grammatical errors, it will likely not make a good impression on the reader. Before submitting, proofread your work and fix any errors you may have missed.

Do be sure to stay objective.

A political essay is not the place for you to share your personal opinions. Instead, it should be a well-reasoned and unbiased exploration of the topic at hand.

Don’t forget to cite your sources.

If you use any information from outside sources in your essay, be sure to properly cite them according to the required citation style. Not only is failing to do so plagiarism, but it also makes your argument look weaker if you cannot back up your claims with evidence.

Do try to be concise.

A political essay is not the place to ramble on and on. Instead, get to the point and make your argument in as few words as possible. This will keep the reader engaged and prevent them from getting lost in your essay.

With the advice above, you should be well on your way to writing a successful political essay. However, if you need some additional inspiration, here are 150 more essay topics to get you started.

Political Essay Topics About History

• Compare and contrast the policies of two different presidents.
• How did the Cold War shape American foreign policy?
• What was the most significant event of the 20th century?
• How did the American Revolution change the political landscape?
• What were the causes of World War I?
• How did Napoleon Bonaparte rise to power?
• What were the significant effects of the French Revolution?
• Compare and contrast the American and French Revolutions.
• What caused the fall of the Roman Empire?
• How did Ancient Greece contribute to modern democracy?
• What were the major political parties of the 19th century?
• How did the Industrial Revolution change the political landscape?
• What were the major triggers of World War II?
• What was the Holocaust, and how did it impact politics?
• How did the Cold War end?
• What are the legacies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher?
• How has the European Union changed over time?
• What are the major political parties in power today?
• Compare and contrast the administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump.
• How has social media changed the way we engage in politics?

Political Essay Topics About Ideologies

• What is the difference between socialism and communism?
• What is capitalism, and how has it changed over time?
• What is Marxism, and what are its significant tenets?
• What is fascism, and how did it come to power?
• How do different political parties view taxation?
• What is the role of the government in a capitalist society?
• How does socialism differ from fascism?
• What is the difference between conservatism and liberalism?
• What is the difference between nationalism and patriotism?
• How do different political parties view welfare?
• What is the role of the government in a socialist society?
• How does communism differ from socialism?
• What is the difference between democracy and dictatorship?
• What is the role of the government in a communist society?
• How do different political parties view education?
• What is the difference between environmentalism and climate change activism?
• What is the role of the government in protecting the environment?
• How do different political parties view gun control?
• What is the role of the government in ensuring public safety?
• How do different political parties view healthcare?

Political Essay Topics About International Relations

• Compare and contrast the foreign policies of two different countries.
• How has globalization changed the international political landscape?
• What are the major causes of war?
• How does terrorism impact international relations?
• What is the role of the United Nations in international politics?
• What are the significant issues facing the European Union today?
• What is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and what is its role in international politics?
• What are the major issues facing NATO today?
• What is the difference between developed and developing countries?
• How do developed and developing countries view each other?
• What is the role of the International Monetary Fund in international politics?
• What are the significant issues facing the International Monetary Fund today?
• What is the World Trade Organization, and what is its role in international politics?
• What are the major issues facing the World Trade Organization today?

Political Essay Topics About Social Issues

• How has the abortion debate changed over time?
• Discuss the political influences that make someone pro-choice or pro-life?
• How has the gay rights movement changed over time?
• Has the government been effective in stymieing the rise of racism?
• What is the difference between sexism and misogyny, and is one political party more prone to it than another?
• How has the Me Too movement changed the conversation about sexual assault and harassment?
• What is the relationship between poverty and crime, and does politics have anything to do with it?
• What is the relationship between education and income inequality?
• Has the government been effective in tackling income inequality?
• How do different political parties view reproductive rights?
• How does religion influence politics?
• What is the relationship between immigration and crime?

Political Essay Topics About Economic Issues

• Should political affiliation have any bearing on economic policy?
• What is the difference between a free market and a command economy?
• How has globalization changed the world economy?
• What are the major issues facing today’s world economy, and are politics to blame?
• Should voters or Congress be responsible for economic policy?
• What is the role of the government in an economy?
• What is the difference between Keynesian economics and supply-side economics?
• What is the difference between laissez-faire capitalism and crony capitalism?
• How have politics funded the rise of inequality in the United States?
• Should the rising cost of healthcare be considered a political issue or a social issue?
• How do different political parties view deregulation?

Political Essay Topics About Politicians

• Compare and contrast the political careers of two different politicians.
• Analyze the effectiveness of a politician’s political campaigns.
• Discuss the role that charisma plays in politics.
• How much does a politician’s personal life influence their political career?
• What is the difference between a successful and unsuccessful politician?
• How do special interest groups influence politics?
• What is the difference between a lobbyist and a politician?
• What is the difference between a career politician and a term politician?
• Compare and contrast the political ideologies of two different politicians.
• Are career politicians more effective than term politicians?
• How do campaign finance laws influence politicians’ decision-making processes?

Political Essay Topics About Elections

• Should the Electoral College be reformed or abolished?
• What is the difference between primary and general elections?
• Discuss the role that voter turnout plays in elections.
• How does gerrymandering influence elections?
• How do campaign finance laws influence elections?
• What is the difference between open and closed elections?
• Should there be term limits for politicians?
• Should people be allowed to vote by mail or early voting?
• How did democratic elections come to be?
• Should voting be mandatory?
• How can we make sure that every vote is counted?
• What is the difference between a hung parliament and a coalition government?
• Should countries have more than two political parties?
• What is the difference between a first-past-the-post system and a proportional representation system?
• What is the difference between a parliamentary system and a presidential system?

Political Essay Topics About Laws and Regulations

• How does a bill become a law?
• What is the difference between a law and a regulation?
• How do regulatory agencies influence politics?
• Discuss the pros and cons of gun control laws.
• Should there be stricter penalties for hate crimes?
• Should the death penalty be abolished?
• Should there be term limits for Supreme Court justices?
• What is the difference between civil law and criminal law?
• How do interest groups influence the passage of laws?
• Should there be limits on campaign spending?
• Should corporations be allowed to donate to political campaigns?
• What is the difference between a veto and a filibuster?
• How does the process of impeachment work?
• What is the difference between judicial review and judicial activism?
• Should members of Congress be allowed to vote for pay raises?

Political Essay Topics About Foreign Policy

• Should the United States have a policy of isolationism?
• How does foreign aid influence politics?
• Should the United States intervene in other countries’ affairs?
• How does the United Nations influence politics?
• What is the difference between diplomacy and foreign policy?
• How do trade agreements influence politics?
• What is the difference between an alliance and a treaty?
• How do sanctions influence politics?
• What is the difference between a colony and an empire?
• How does decolonization influence politics?
• How do border disputes influence politics?
• What is the difference between a refugee and an immigrant?
• How does immigration policy influence politics?
• What is the difference between a country and a nation?
• How does nationalism influence politics?

Political Essay Topics About Civil Rights and Liberties

• What is the difference between civil rights and civil liberties?
• How do the Bill of Rights and the Constitution influence politics?
• Should there be limits on free speech?
• How do hate speech laws influence politics?
• Should there be limits on the right to bear arms?
• How do gun control laws influence politics?
• What is the difference between a search warrant and a warrantless search?
• How do search and seizure laws influence politics?
• How do Miranda rights influence police interrogation?
• What is the difference between probable cause and reasonable suspicion?
• How do stop and frisk laws influence politics?
• Should there be limits on police use of deadly force?
• How do racial profiling laws influence politics?
• What is the difference between affirmative action and reverse discrimination?
• Should there be limits on affirmative action?

No matter the type of essay you need to write, these 150 political essay topics should give you plenty of material to work with. Remember that you can always narrow your focus to a specific country, a specific type of government, or specific law or regulation. And if you need help writing your essay, re-read the helpful tips above to ensure you get a good grade.

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If you are a teacher searching for essay topics to assign to your U.S. government or civics class or looking for ideas, do not fret. It is easy to integrate debates and discussions into the classroom environment. These topic suggestions provide a wealth of ideas for written assignments such as  position papers , compare-and-contrast essays , and  argumentative essays . Scan the following 25 question topics and ideas to find just the right one. You'll soon be reading interesting papers from your students after they grapple with these challenging and important issues.

• Compare and contrast what is a direct democracy versus representative democracy. 
• React to the following statement: Democratic decision-making should be extended to all areas of life including schools, the workplace, and the government. 
• Compare and contrast the Virginia and New Jersey plans. Explain how these led to the Great Compromise .
• Pick one thing about the U.S. Constitution including its amendments that you think should be changed. What modifications would you make? Explain your reasons for making this change.
• What did Thomas Jefferson mean when he said, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants?" Do you think that this statement still applies to today's world? 
• Compare and contrast mandates and conditions of aid regarding the federal government's relationship with states. For example, how has the Federal Emergency Management Agency delivered support to states and commonwealths that have experienced natural disasters?
• Should individual states have more or less power compared to the federal government when implementing laws dealing with topics such as the legalization of marijuana  and abortion ? 
• Outline a program that would get more people to vote in presidential elections or local elections.
• What are the dangers of gerrymandering when it comes to voting and presidential elections?
• Compare and contrast the major political parties in the United States. What policies are they preparing for upcoming elections?
• Why would voters choose to vote for a third party, even though they know that their candidate has virtually no chance of winning? 
• Describe the major sources of money that are donated to political campaigns. Check out the Federal Election Regulatory Commission's website for information.
• Should corporations be treated as individuals regarding being allowed to donate to political campaigns?  Look at the 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling on the issue. Defend your answer. 
• Explain the role of social media in connecting interest groups that have grown stronger as the major political parties have grown weaker. 
• Explain why the media has been called the fourth branch of government. Include your opinion on whether this is an accurate portrayal.
• Compare and contrast the campaigns of U.S. Senate and House of Representatives candidates.
• Should term limits be instituted for members of Congress? Explain your answer.
• Should members of Congress vote their conscience or follow the will of the people who elected them into office? Explain your answer.
• Explain how executive orders have been used by presidents throughout the history of the U.S. What is the number of executive orders issued by the current president?
• In your opinion, which of the three branches of the federal government has the most power? Defend your answer.
• Which of the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment do you consider the most important? Explain your answer. 
• Should a school be required to get a warrant before searching a student's property? Defend your answer. 
• Why did the Equal Rights Amendment fail? What kind of campaign could be run to see it passed?
• Explain how the 14th Amendment has affected civil liberties in the United States from the time of its passage at the end of the Civil War.
• Do you think that the federal government has enough, too much or just the right amount of power? Defend your answer.
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WashU Expert: Comparing political parties’ economic outlook, plans

When global stocks tumbled and fears of a slowing U.S. economy surged at the beginning of the month, former President Donald Trump wasted no time in placing the blame directly on his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. It’s a familiar tune for Trump, who has lamented the state of the economy under President Joe Biden’s administration for months.

Democrats, however, have painted a very different picture of the economy, often calling it the envy of the world. Who is right? And how much of the credit — or blame — does the Biden administration deserve?

Below, John Horn , a professor of practice in economics at Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis, answers these questions and compares the 2024 candidates’ economic plans.

The economy through red or blue lenses

The economy is always top of mind for voters, and this year will be no different. But objectively grading the economy is harder than it may seem, according to Horn.

“It’s hard to not view the economy through a political lens. Presidents tend to get more credit for a good economy than they deserve from their supporters. Likewise, they get blamed for things outside of their control by their opponents,” Horn said.

“The reality is that presidents don’t have a lot of direct effect on the economy because they don’t control monetary policy. They can’t control the amount of money in the system, which affects inflation primarily. They also cannot control interest rates, which affects economic activity, consumption, business investment, etc. At most, presidents can try to persuade the Federal Reserve with public statements, but the U.S. has intentionally tried to keep the central bank independent from political forces.”

Presidents also cannot control spending and taxes — that is up to Congress to manage through legislation. When it comes to the economy, presidents are limited to executive action and indirect ways of influencing Congress to pass legislation supporting their economic agenda, Horn explained.

‘When we look back on Biden’s handling of the economy, I think he will be praised for his consistency and focus and how that benefited the economy.’ John Horn

“When we look back on Biden’s handling of the economy, I think he will be praised for his consistency and focus and how that benefited the economy,” Horn said. “Rather than enacting dozens of policies, his administration primarily focused on passing the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act, which was essentially the Build Back Better Plan with a new name to get it passed.  

“There’s something to be said for introducing a game-changer plan — including where we’re providing subsidies or imposing taxes — and then stepping back and letting the economy learn how to deal with it without constantly tinkering with it. Businesses do not like ambiguity and uncertainty. Consistency is good for businesses because they know where to invest their money and efforts.”  

How the U.S. economy measures up

The U.S. economy has had its ups and downs since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic — as the past week has demonstrated — but there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic, Horn said.

“I think if you look at the economy objectively and forget who the president is, you will see that the U.S. economy is doing really well. For the last two years, the economy has consistently grown by 2.5-3%. We have inflation, but it’s back down to 3%. And unemployment is around 4%. Objectively, I think most economists would say, that’s fantastic, especially in comparison to the rest of the world.”

The Chinese economy, for example, has been slowing down. The European Union economy also has been muddling along with little to no growth, Horn said. Germany, the biggest economy in the EU, has been bouncing in and out of the recession zone in recent years, he said.

However, that’s not to say that all Americans are experiencing the same economic opportunity.

“On average, the American economy is doing great. But when you start looking at different sectors, regions and income levels, you’ll see that there are winners and there are losers,” Horn said. “In particular, lower-income workers’ wages have gone up, but they still haven’t recovered from the inflation spike in 2022. So these workers are still behind the curve in terms of being able to afford what they had four to five years ago.”

Shifting focus to long-term plans

We need to get away from focusing on monthly gains and losses and focus more on where we’re going and what we need to do to be successful in the future, Horn said. That’s not to say we can control where the economy will be in five, 10 or 15 years, but we should focus on changes that we see coming on the horizon, he added.

“For starters, we are an aging population. Not only are we are going to have to pay more in health care to take care of older Americans, but we’re going to need more workers to fill their jobs — or all the rosiest predictions for GenAI and automation need to materialize. Otherwise, it’s going to get harder and harder to make the numbers work.”

Decades of slowing birth rate trends means there will not be enough workers to replace those who are retiring. Immigration could help, but that’s a challenging and deeply political issue at the moment.

Another challenge on the not-so-distant horizon is climate change.

“Whether you believe climate change is man-made or not, the climate is changing, and the rest of the world seems to be jumping on the alternative energy sources bandwagon,” Horn said. “One of the frustrating things about American politics right now is we keep focusing on the ‘right now’ rather than what’s coming next. If we fail to invest in these new energy sources now, we’re going to be importing energy from the rest of the world in the future.”

“Whether you want to give President Biden credit or not, that was the intent of the Inflation Reduction Act — investing in the future of energy production, as well as the future of manufacturing and technology.”

Lastly, neither party is doing enough to address the rapidly expanding national debt, Horn said. That’s not a problem right now because people still want to borrow U.S. debt, but it could be a problem down the road.   

“Both parties contribute to the national debt differently. For the most part, Republicans contribute to the debt mainly by cutting taxes, and Democrats contribute to the debt by increasing spending,” Horn said. “Neither one is really fixing the debt — they’re both just pointing fingers at each other. Unfortunately, as with most political things, it’s going to take a combination of raising taxes and cutting spending to fix the debt problem. But no one wants to make that political choice.”

Comparing candidates’ economic plans

Harris’ campaign — which is just a few weeks old — has not released her formal economic plans yet, but one can expect her administration to continue most of Biden’s economic agenda, Horn said. That would include continued investment in infrastructure, alternative energy sources, manufacturing and technology.

Trump’s campaign has not shared a lot of details about his economic plans. But what is known — in particular, calls to impose harsh tariffs and deport millions of immigrants — would hurt the economy, Horn said.

“Trump has called for a 10% tariff on all imported goods and 40% on goods coming in from China. We import a lot. We can’t instantaneously start producing everything in the United States. That’s not to say we wouldn’t eventually adjust, but there’s no way around it in the short term.

“And if you take millions of workers out of the economy, many industries including food production and manufacturing assembly services will suffer. If you don’t have labor, prices go up and the economy slows down,” Horn said. “I’m not saying we should just let anyone in — we need to address immigration — but if you don’t have labor, prices go up and the economy slows down. That’s basic economics.”

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Call for Undergraduate Papers: Tulane Journal of Policy & Political Economy

The Tulane Journal of Policy & Political Economy is currently accepting article submissions for our next edition. Submissions may be   strong papers written in or out of class ,   independent studies , and   honors theses .

The Tulane Journal is an  internationally recognized undergraduate publication  focusing on original student research in politics, economics, and public health. Submitted articles are   peer- and faculty-reviewed  by a   panel of 50 professors . Those that are accepted are   published in print and online . Previous editions have received submissions from universities across four continents and are indexed in the  Library of Congress . New editions will circulate in Google Scholar and other academic hosts. 

We have officially partnered with the Tulane Departments of Political Science and Economics, the Tulane Murphy Institute, the Tulane School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine, and the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE) Societies of the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics.

Submissions can be made at the following link :   www.tulanejournal.org/submit . To learn more, visit   https://www.tulanejournal.org/ . 

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What the Polls Say About Harris Erasing Trump’s Lead on the Economy

By Kristen Soltis Anderson

Ms. Anderson, a contributing Opinion writer, is a Republican pollster and a moderator of Opinion’s series of focus groups.

One thing has been true about the presidential election polling for many months now , regardless of who was up or down in the horse race: Donald Trump has been favored on the issue of the economy, and the economy has ranked as voters’ most important issue . Whatever other obstacles Mr. Trump and his campaign have faced, more voters have tended to trust him with the economy than the Biden-Harris ticket.

According to at least one poll, though, voters’ attitudes may have changed. In a new survey conducted for The Financial Times, by a single point, Vice President Kamala Harris edges out Mr. Trump on the question of who voters trust more to handle the economy.

This result is a perfect example of when the trend line, not the data point itself, tells the most interesting story. In isolation, voters being essentially evenly split on anything isn’t particularly surprising. The race for the White House is, at this point, very likely to be a close one, and seeing voters divide into their respective camps is what you’d expect.

But Ms. Harris’s slight edge on the economy in that Financial Times poll exists in the context of the numbers that came before it. To see the shift from Mr. Trump winning on the top issue to it being a jump ball will be an eye-opening finding if it is replicated in other polls.

To be clear, this isn’t necessarily because voters have started feeling a whole lot better about the state of things economically. The FT poll shows a fairly consistent majority of Americans reporting that when it comes to their own financial situation, they’re “surviving” rather than “thriving.” Almost three-quarters of respondents say they have a negative view of the overall condition of the economy, and half say they are worse off than they were before President Biden took office.

Rather, the poll suggests that Mr. Trump and Republicans don’t seem to have succeeded yet in connecting Ms. Harris to Mr. Biden’s economic policies. If they’re able to do so, it will be a significant challenge for Ms. Harris; more than six in 10 voters in the same poll say that if she’s elected, Ms. Harris should either “make major changes” or “take a completely different approach” from Mr. Biden.

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Positive Incentives: The Income Effect and The Optimal Regulation of Crime

Theories of crime in economics focus on the roles of deterrence and incapacitation in reducing criminal activity. In addition to deterrence, a growing body of empirical evidence has shown that both income support and employment subsidies can play a role in crime reduction. This paper extends the Becker-Ehrlich model to a standard labor supply model that includes the notion of a consumption need (Barzel and McDonald (1973)) highlights the role of substitution vs income effects when an individual chooses to engage in crime. Second, we show that whether the production of criminal activity is a substitute or a complement with the production of legitimate activity is central to the design of optimal policy. We find that both individual responsiveness to deterrence and optimal policy vary considerably with context, which is consistent with the large variation in the effect of deterrence on crime. Hence, optimal policy is a combination of deterrence, work subsidies and direct income transfers to the individual that vary with both income and location.

We thanks Ronen Avraham, Bocar Ba, Janet Curre, Ben Enke, Jeff Grogger, Murat Mungan, Nicola Persico, Mitchell Polinsky, Emmanuel Saez and the participants at the 2021 Theoretical Law and Economics Conference, Northwestern University and session participants at the 2022 Society of Labor Economics Annual meeting for helpful comments and discussions. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

MARC RIS BibTeΧ

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