Comparative political economy: an evolving field of interdisciplinary research

Marino Regini

A chapter in Handbook of Comparative Political Economy, 2025, pp 2-28 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This Introduction to the Handbook is meant to describe the evolution and the current state of an interdisciplinary field commonly defined as Comparative Political Economy (CPE). Each of its building blocks (leading theories, main actors, relevant institutions and policy areas, geographical boundaries, emerging themes) is the object of one part of the Handbook; hence this Introduction aims at giving a bird’s-eye view of all of them. Overall, it is a moderately positive view of the field's achievements, with a few lines of criticism based on two main arguments: a) the different approaches to CPE have not tried to build a cumulative understanding of how capitalist societies work differently through time and space, as each new approach has aimed at replacing the previous ones instead of proposing amendments to them and new syntheses; and b) the deep intellectual aversion of CPE scholars to neoliberalism has often led them to reject it on normative grounds rather than to challenge some of its analytical assumptions and empirical findings (e.g. on how to assess satisfactory economic performance). From this nuanced view of the past and present of CPE, a few suggestions for its future are then tentatively outlined.

Keywords: Political economy; Comparative institutional analysis; Capitalism; Forms of governance; Advanced capitalist democracies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035327775
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