INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

To what extent do the newer approaches to International Political Economy render the three traditional paradigms obsolete?

To what extent do the newer approaches to International Political Economy render the three traditional paradigms obsolete?

Introduction

International Political Economy (IPE) is a relatively new sub discipline within political science, the first textbook in the area was published in 1977, and courses were not routinely offered until the middle 19805. Even today, the boundaries of IPE are not always clear-the overlap with political economy research in comparative 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 World Trade Organization (WTO) dispute settlements, to the impact of international flows of goods or capital on national political systems (Campbell, 2009, 266).

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 formulating refutable analytical claims and evaluating their fit with empirical regularities.

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 the work of scholars who challenge the positivist approach that is assumed here. We believe that this survey does reflect the principal focuses of North American scholarship, although it is not reflective of much European scholarship.

The most challenging questions in IPE have to do with the interaction of domestic and international factors as they affect economic policies and outcomes. Modelling interactive effects is complex, but there have been exciting research efforts in IPE along these lines. We begin with a survey of some of the more-promising efforts in this direction. It quickly becomes evident that many of the advances made in the study of domestic-international interaction would have been impossible without firm foundations in the analysis of domestic and of international factors in and of themselves. Indeed, recent work on the international-domestic research frontier builds heavily on progress made over the last couple of decades in the analysis of the domestic and international levels; and these analyses provide the essential building blocks for the current and future study of interaction (Abdelal, 2010, 11).

Approaches

Realistic Approach

Since reality is changing, so must our ...