Ripoliticizzare le politiche: concetti e strumenti della "Historical Materialist Policy Analysis"

Daniela Caterina, Adriano Cozzolino and Diego Giannone

Stato e mercato, 2024, issue 3, 401-426

Abstract: This paper introduces the Historical Materialist Policy Analysis (HMPA) approach to an Italian audience for the first time. This perspective offers an alternative lens in policy studies, examining individual policies while placing them within broader contexts, thereby enabling a comprehensive understanding of their interconnections. The article addresses both HMPA’s theoretical foundations and its empirical applications. Specifically, it clarifies three key aspects: (I) the significance of material interests among various social forces in the observed policy field, (II) the centrality of the integral state in shaping and reconciling these interests, partly through policies, and (III) how these policies fit into broader political and hegemonic projects. These points counteract depoliticizing approaches that conceive policies as isolated outcomes of abstract, non-conflictual, and ahistorical rationalities. Instead, HMPA highlights the importance of starting from real contexts and conflicts among social and political actors, fostering a more realistic analytical approach to understanding policies and their roles in social and political (re)production. The paper further shifts this theoretical discussion to empirical analysis and operationalization, focusing on HMPA’s three dimensions: context, actor, and process analysis. Combined, these dimensions establish a rigorous, realistic, and critical framework for studying policies and their dynamic interactions with sociopolitical processes across time and space. To illustrate the approach’s flexibility and methodological creativity, the paper also reviews existing HMPA studies, demonstrating their capacity to address the ongoing challenge of repoliticising policies.

Keywords: Current Heterodox Approaches; Socialist; Marxian; Sraffian; Capitalist Economies; Capitalist Institutions; Welfare State; Comparative Analysis of Economic Systems; Political Processes: Rent Seeking Lobbying Elections Legislatures and Voting Behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/download/article/10.1425/116070 (application/pdf)
https://www.rivisteweb.it/doi/10.1425/116070 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mul:jl9ury:doi:10.1425/116070:y:2024:i:3:p:401-426

Access Statistics for this article

Stato e mercato is currently edited by Michele Salvati

More articles in Stato e mercato from Società editrice il Mulino
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().