The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy

Abstract The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy surveys the field of political economy. Over its long lifetime, political economy has had many different meanings: the science of managing the resources of a nation so as to provide wealth to its inhabitants for Adam Smith; the study of how the ownership of the means of production influenced historical processes for Marx; the study of the inter-relationship between economics and politics for some twentieth-century commentators; and for others, a methodology emphasizing individual rationality (the economic or public choice approach) or institutional adaptation (the sociological version). This Handbook views political economy as a grand (if imperfect) synthesis of these various strands, treating political economy as the methodology of economics applied to the analysis of political behaviour and institutions. The fifty-eight articles range from micro to macro, national to international, institutional to behavioural, methodological to substantive. Articles on social choice, constitutional theory, and public economics are set alongside ones on voters, parties and pressure groups, macroeconomics and politics, capitalism and democracy, and international political economy and international conflict.