The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy

by Weingast, Barry R.; Wittman, Donald A.

• ISBN13: 9780199548477
• ISBN10: 0199548471
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-08-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Over its long lifetime, "political economy" has had many different meanings: the science of managing the resources of a nation so as to provide wealth to its inhabitants for Adam Smith; the study of how the ownership of the means of production influenced historical processes for Marx; the study of the inter-relationship between economics and politics for some twentieth-century commentators; and for others, a methodology emphasizing individual rationality (the economic or "public choice" approach) or institutional adaptation (the sociological version). This Handbook views political economy as a grand (if imperfect) synthesis of these various strands, treating political economy as the methodology of economics applied to the analysis of political behavior and institutions. This Handbook surveys the field of political economy, with fifty-eight chapters ranging from micro to macro, national to international, institutional to behavioral, methodological to substantive. Chapters on social choice, constitutional theory, and public economics are set alongside ones on voters, parties and pressure groups, macroeconomics and politics, capitalism and democracy, and international political economy and international conflict.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Nature of Political Economy

Voters, Candidates, and Pressure Groups

Overview: Voters, Candidates, and Parties

Rational Voters and Political Advertising

Candidate Objectives and Electoral Equilibrium

Political Income Redistribution

The Impact of Electoral Laws on Political Parties

Legislative Bodies

Overview: Legislatures and Parliaments in Comparative Context

The Organization of Democratic Legislatures

Coalition Governments

Bicameralism

Interaction of the Legislature, President, Bureaucracy and the Courts

Overview: Separation of Power

Pivotal Politics

Presidential Agenda Control

Politics, Delegation, and Bureaucracy

The Judiciary

Constitutional Theory

Overview: Constitutionalism

Self-Enforcing Democracy

Constitutins as Expressive Documents

The Protection of Liberty, Property, and Equality

Federalism

Social Choice

Overview: Social Choice, Herve Moulin

A Toolkit for Voting Theory

Interpersonal Comparisons of Well-Being

Fair Division

Public Finance and Public Economics

Overview: Structure and Coherence in the Political Economy of Public Finance

Fiscal Institutions

Voting and Efficient Public Good Mechanisms

Fiscal Competition

Politics and Macroeconomics

Overview:The Nonpolitics of Monetary Policy

Political Business Cycles

Voting and the Macroeconomy

The Political Economy of Exchange Rates

Democracy and Capitalism

Overview: Democracy and Capitalism

Inequality

Comparative Perspectives on the Place of the State in the Economy

Democratization

Historical and Comparative Development and Non-Democratic Regimes

Overview

Authoritarian Regimes

The Developmental State

Constitutional Design and Economic Performance

Economic Geogrpahy

International Political Economy

Overview: International Political Economy: A Maturing Discipline

National Borders and the Size of Nations

European Integration

Trade, Immigration, and Cross-Border Investment

International Relations and Conflict

Overview: Central Issues in the Study of International Conflict

Ethnic Mobilization and Ethnic Conflict

Democracy, Peace, and War

Anarchy

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