scholarly journals International Monetary Cooperation and Democratic Institutions: The Importance of Executive-Legislative Relations in Germany and France, 1919-1929

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-36
Author(s):  
Chansoo Cho
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Institutional Variables ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Monetary Cooperation ◽  
International Interaction ◽  
Monetary Order

This article examines how changes in• formal political institutions can affect the extent to which a nationally defined monetary policy is committed to an international monetary order by comparing the German and French cases during the period of 1919–1929. There is no dearth of studies that employ domestic political institutional variables to explain policy outcomes regarding international economic relations. And at the same time, for the past decade, a host of “second image reversed” works have improved our understanding of domestic-international interaction. While many scholars of international political economy have written about domestic sources of trade policy, increasing numbers of authors have devoted substantial attention to the explanatory power of domestic variables in monetary issues. Particularly, when accounting for variations on democratic commitment to international monetary cooperation, the importance of executive-legislative relations deserves special attention. Germany and France during the 1920s provide us with an interesting pair of comparison in that their parliamentary democracies had subtle differences in executive-legislative relations.

How Did American International Political Economy Become Reductionist? A Historiography of a Discipline

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Kindred Winecoff
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Open Economy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Statistical Models ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
International System ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Foreign Economic Policy ◽  
Individual Level

First-wave international political economy (IPE) was preoccupied with the “complex interdependencies” within a world system that (it believed) was rapidly devolving following the 1971 collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates. The original IPE scholars were more dedicated to theorizing about the emergence and evolution of global systems than any strict methodology. As IPE developed, it began to emphasize the possibility that institutions could promote cooperation in an anarchic environment, so IPE scholarship increasingly studied the conditions under which these institutions might emerge. Second-wave IPE scholars began to focus on the domestic “level of analysis” for explanatory power, and in particular analyzed the role of domestic political institutions in promoting global economic cooperation (or conflict). They also employed a “second-image reversed” paradigm in which the international system was treated as an explanatory variable that influenced the domestic policymaking process. In opening up the “black box” of domestic politics, in particular as it pertained to foreign economic policy, the “American school” of IPE thoroughly explored the terrain with regression-based statistical models that assume observational independence. As a result, complex interdependencies in the global system were increasingly ignored. Over time the analytical focus progressively shifted to micro-level units—firms and individuals, whenever possible—using neoclassical economic theory as its logical underpinning (with complications for political factors). This third wave of IPE, “open economy politics,” has been criticized in the post-crisis period for its narrow focus, rigid methodology, and lack of systemic theory. Leading scholars have called modern IPE “boring,” “deplorable,” “myopic,” and “reductionist,” among other epithets. A “fourth-wave” of IPE must retain its strong commitment to empiricism while re-integrating systemic processes into its analysis. A new class of complex statistical models is capable of incorporating interdependencies as well as domestic- and individual-level processes into a common framework. This will allow scholars to model the global political economy as an interdependent system consisting of multiple strata.

Interest Groups and Order in Global Economic Relations

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain Osgood
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Order And Disorder ◽  
Prime Movers ◽  
The Many ◽  
Organized Interest ◽  
Interest Group Influence

Scholars of international relations have long pointed to organized interest groups as prime movers in the creation of order and disorder in global economic relations. This review introduces interest groups, illustrating the many types—representing producers, workers, consumers, issues, ideologies, and identities—that are examined in current scholarship. The costs, benefits, and challenges of collective organization are highlighted. It also provides a synthetic overview of four stylized varieties of interest group explanations for international order, focusing on: preferences and group size; organization and parties; domestic political institutions; and international institutions and organizations. Each of these factors shaping interest group influence has been treated as fixed in some accounts and as an endogenous outcome of interest group activity in others. Interest group-centered explanations for global order remain a vital and variegated approach within International Political Economy (IPE).

Comparative Political Economy

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Menz
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Industrial Relations ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Comparative Political Economy ◽  
Technological Parameters ◽  
Private Debt

This new and comprehensive volume invites the reader on a tour of the exciting subfield of comparative political economy. The book provides an in-depth account of the theoretical debates surrounding different models of capitalism. Tracing the origins of the field back to Adam Smith and the French Physiocrats, the development of the study of models of political-economic governance is laid out and reviewed. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) sets itself apart from International Political Economy (IPE), focusing on domestic economic and political institutions that compose in combination diverse models of political economy. Drawing on evidence from the US, the UK, France, Germany, Sweden, and Japan, the volume affords detailed coverage of the systems of industrial relations, finance, welfare states, and the economic role of the state. There is also a chapter that charts the politics of public and private debt. Much of the focus in CPE has rested on ideas, interests, and institutions, but the subfield ought to take the role of culture more seriously. This book offers suggestions for doing so. It is intended as an introduction to the field for postgraduate students, yet it also offers new insights and fresh inspiration for established scholars. The Varieties of Capitalism approach seems to have reached an impasse, but it could be rejuvenated by exploring the composite elements of different models and what makes them hang together. Rapidly changing technological parameters, new and more recent environmental challenges, demographic change, and immigration will all affect the governance of the various political economy models throughout the OECD. The final section of the book analyses how these impending challenges will reconfigure and threaten to destabilize established national systems of capitalism.

scholarly journals From Multiple Streams to Muddling Through: Policy Process Theories and “Field of Vision”

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-127
Author(s):  
Linda J. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Policy Process ◽  
Explanatory Power ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Multiple Streams ◽  
The North ◽  
Field Of Vision ◽  
Process Theories ◽  
Relevant Factors

AbstractContemporary policy process theories are used to explain important aspects of the policy process, including the emergence or change of policies over time. However, these theories vary notably in their composition, such as their scope of analytical space, key concepts and assumptions, models of individual decision-making, and relationships between process-relevant factors and actors. There is little guidance on which theory may be best suited for explaining particular policy outcomes or how the different elements of the theories influence their analytical power. To begin to address this gap in the literature, a comparative analysis applied four established policy process theories to explain the emergence of the same policy outcome, a set of environmental policies associated with the North American Free Trade Agreement, while varying the analytical space or “field of vision” spatially and temporally. Overall, each theory demonstrated strong explanatory power but within analytical spaces of different scales, which indicates that the dimensionality aspects aspects the analytical space of policy process theories may contribute to a convergence in shared knowledge.

Political Institutions, Policymaking Processes, and Policy Outcomes in Mexico

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabrice Lehoucq ◽  
Gabriel L. Negretto ◽  
Francisco Javier Aparicio ◽  
Benito Nacif ◽  
Allyson Benton
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Policy Outcomes

How bureaucratic leadership shapes policy outcomes: partisan politics and affluent citizens’ incomes in the American states

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (2) ◽  
pp. 305-328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Berkowitz ◽  
George A. Krause
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Administrative Leadership ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Electoral Institutions ◽  
American States ◽  
Policy Objectives ◽  
Executive Agency

AbstractWe maintain that political institutions’ policy objectives are best met under conditions when they are unified, and also when their administrative leadership is effective. We apply this argument to the understanding of how unified Democratic and Republican governments in the American states have influenced the incomes of affluent citizens. We find that affluent income gains occur under unified Republican state governments when compensation to executive agency heads is sufficiently high. These income gains are notable relative to both divided and unified partisan control of state governments. The evidence highlights the asymmetric role that bureaucratic leadership plays in attaining policy outcomes consistent with political institutions’ policy preferences, while underscoring the limits of electoral institutions to shape policy outcomes of their own accord. Efforts to lower the capacity of the administrative leadership constrain unified political institutions from converting their policy objectives into policy outcomes.

scholarly journals Forging an Australasian Region: Trans-Tasman Integration and Interregionalism in the Asia-Pacific

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Matthew Adrian Castle
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Institutional Design ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Asia Pacific ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
Ability To Act ◽  
Simple Step

<p>Most commentators view the Australia-New Zealand Closer Economic Relations (CER) agreement as a remarkable example of bilateral integration. CER is not usually regarded, however, as a platform for Australia and New Zealand to jointly engage with third parties. Yet, more than a decade of CER-ASEAN relations culminated, in 2010, in a Free Trade Agreement (the ASEAN-Australia-New Zealand FTA, AANZFTA) between the two regions. This suggests that intra-regional trans-Tasman integration might “spill over” into external cooperation with third parties. Close cooperation and joint approaches have not, however, eventuated in other cases. Australia and New Zealand applied separately to join the interregional Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) forum in 2008 and 2009, indicating that their ability to act as a region is not consistent across policy or issue areas. This is an intriguing empirical puzzle, given that most observers of interregionalism elsewhere understand the ability of regions to act in international relations (‘actorness’) as a general, rather than variable, characteristic. Why, then, did Australia and New Zealand negotiate as a single entity with ASEAN on an FTA, but did not coordinate their approach in the ASEM case? This thesis argues that the process of trans-Tasman integration has produced a set of issue-specific institutions, which present Australian and New Zealand policy makers with a ready-made framework for cooperation with third parties in some, but not all, issue areas. Once these institutions were established, it proved a relatively simple step to extend the scope of their operation beyond the trans-Tasman level. This suggests that in the trans-Tasman case, ‘actorness’, understood as the basis on which regions can engage in international relations, may be issue-specific rather than generalised. This thesis makes its case by critically analysing the emergence and evolution of CER-ASEAN relations and by documenting Australia and New Zealand’s separate applications to join ASEM. It draws on extensive archival research and interviews with key actors and decision makers. The thesis adds to the nascent field of interregionalism by offering a new empirical case in which to test and develop theories. It makes a contribution to our understanding of the way institutions shape the scope for regions to “act” in international relations. More broadly, this study provides insights into the relationship between institutional design, individual actors and policy outcomes.</p>

scholarly journals Economic Analysis of International Interaction: International Economics and International Political Economy

2013 ◽  
pp. 102-112
Author(s):  
A. G. Оleinov
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Economic Analysis ◽  
International Economics ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
International Interaction

The article focuses on two major fields of economic analysis of international interaction: international economics and international political economy. Each of the areas is considered through its formal methodological foundations. An attempt to formulate a general theoretical and methodological foundations of economic analysis of international interaction is made.

Duterte’s Foreign Policy Pivot and Its Impact on Philippine Trade and Investments: An International Political Economy Perspective

2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-160
Author(s):  
Jenny D. Balboa
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Foreign Policy ◽  
International Political Economy ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Political ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Trade And Investment

Abstract Since the Philippines elected President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016, the country’s foreign policy seems to have become more uncertain. President Duterte’s mercurial personality and antagonistic tirades against the country’s traditional Western allies, including the United States (US) and the European Union (EU), and his statements of building closer ties with China and Russia, had changed the political and diplomatic tone of the Philippines overall. Certainly, the political relationship between the Philippines and the West has been changed by Duterte’s strong remarks against the US and EU. Has this change spilled over to the economy? The paper presents an international political economy framework in examining the impact of Duterte’s foreign policy pivot to the country’s foreign economic relations, focusing on trade and investment. The paper argues that Duterte’s foreign policy shift is mainly shaped by Duterte’s “politics of survival”. Not firmly anchored in any idea, norms, or interest that can clearly benefit the country, Duterte is unable to provide coherent guidance and leadership on the foreign policy pivot, particularly on the economy. Duterte’s lack of guidance provided the technocrats with the policy space to continue the policies from the previous administration and not to divert radically from previous economic policies. The stability of the economic institutions provided a refuge in the period of uncertainty. As a result, the foreign economic relations of the Philippines has not radically shifted. The trade and investment situation of the Philippines remained stable, and economic relations with traditional partners are maintained.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document