Contemporarily, political economy refers to different, but related, approaches to studying economic and political behaviours, ranging from the combining of economics with other fields, to the using of different, fundamental assumptions that challenge orthodox economic assumptions. Political economy most commonly refers to interdisciplinary studies drawing upon economics, law, and political science in explaining how political institutions, the political environment, and the economic system -- capitalist, socialist, mixed -- influence each other. When narrowly construed, it refers to applied topics in economics implicating public policy, such as monopoly, market protection, government fiscal policy, and rent seeking. This book presents the newest research in the field.

"This book examines the influence of big companies in political institutions, the newsroom, and the classroom and its effect on every aspect of public and private life"--

Drawing together leading scholars, the book provides a revealing new map of the US political economy in cross-national perspective.

Economies - and the government institutions that support them - reflect a moral and political choice, a choice we can make and remake. Since the dawn of industrialization and democratization in the late eighteenth century, there has been a succession of political economic frameworks, reflecting changes in technology, knowledge, trade, global connections, political power, and the expansion of citizenship. The challenges of today reveal the need for a new moral political economy that recognizes the politics in political economy. It also requires the redesign of our social, economic, and governing institutions based on assumptions about humans as social beings rather than narrow self-serving individualists. This Element makes some progress toward building a new moral political economy by offering both a theory of change and some principles for institutional (re)design.

Forward thinking and provocative, this Research Agenda demonstrates different approaches to the field from experts focusing on global and local, and historical and contemporary issues. Eminent global scholars examine a diverse selection of interdisciplinary themes, raising questions surrounding future research, offering examples and linking the theory to its implications for practice and policy.

This volume serves as an introduction to the field of positive political economy and the economic and political processes with which it is concerned. This new research tradition is distinct from both normative and historical approaches to political economy. Grounded in the rational-actor methodology of microeconomics, positive political economy is the study of rational decisions in a context of political and economic institutions. More analytical than traditional approaches, it is concerned with the derivation of principles and propositions against which real-world experience may be compared. Its focus is on empirical regularities, and its goal is theoretical explanation. The field has focused on three main areas of research: models of collective action, constraints on competitive market processes, and the analysis of transaction costs. Developments in all of these areas are covered in the book. The first part of the volume surveys the field, while the second part displays positive political economy at work, examining a variety of subjects. The final part contains essays by leading political economists on the theoretical foundations of the field.

This book presents latest research in the field of Political Economy, dealing with the integration of economics and politics and the way institutions affect social decisions. The focus is on innovative topics such as an institutional analysis based on case studies; the influence of activists on political decisions; new techniques for analyzing elections, involving game theory and empirical methods.