International Political Economy: The state of the sub-discipline

2 International Political Economy (IPE) is a relatively new sub-discipline within Political Science. The first textbook in the area was published in 1977 (Spero 1977), and regularly scheduled undergraduate and graduate courses were not routinely offered until the middle 1980s. Even today, the boundaries of IPE are not always clear – the overlap with political economy research in Comparative Politics and American Politics is especially great. We take the field to include all work for which international economic factors are an important cause or consequence. This ranges from the domestic politics of trade and exchange-rate policy, through the politics of WTO dispute settlements, to the impact of international flows of goods or capital on national political systems. Despite imprecision about the definition of IPE, in the past twenty years the field has approached consensus on theories, methods, analytical frameworks, and important questions. This is not to say that scholars in IPE all agree with one another. However, disagreement today generally takes the form of contention among productive, theoretically-and empirically-motivated claims, rather than the paradigmatic clashes that earlier characterized IPE. Scholars typically see alternative approaches as complementary or applying under different, specifiable, conditions. Other disagreements might be debates about the relative weights that we should attribute to alternative explanatory variables. These types of scholarly differences are the hallmark of a mature field of research that has moved from sweeping attempts at self-definition to the practice of normal science. This essay presents what we believe to be the consensus among political scientists with regard to the analysis of the politics of international economic relations. The review we present is not intended to be exhaustive. We do not, for example, attempt to include 3 the work of scholars who challenge the positivist approach that is assumed here. We believe that this survey does, nonetheless, reflect the principal focuses of North American scholarship in IPE. Most scholarship published in the principal journals of the profession and the sub-discipline, and most graduate training and research, are within the range of the theoretical and empirical topics and approaches presented here. We start with a discussion of the domestic politics of foreign economic policymaking. Here scholars typically begin with a picture of the principal economic interests at stake and their forms of organization, then investigate how these interests transit through the variegated electoral, legislative, and bureaucratic institutions of national political economies. We follow with a detailed discussion …