Distinctive Political Economy Research Articles

Federalising Socialism Without Doctrine

The Australian Constitution is only partly ‘liberal’ (securing political and economic liberties); another part is ‘socialist without doctrine’ (empowering governments to own and operate vast public capital, while providing social insurance in a market economy). That mixture is common in modern advanced economies but was anomalous in the Anglophone constitutional tradition in 1901. Legislative power over ‘old age and invalid pensions’, ‘railway construction’ and ‘conciliation and arbitration for the prevention and settlement of industrial disputes’ was an accepted part of the incipient Federal scheme but repugnant to Anglophone constitutional orthodoxy of the 19th century. The integration of ‘colonial socialism’ into the Constitution created one of the longest-standing puzzles in Australian jurisprudence, the Surplus Revenue Case of 1908, and laid the foundations for federal dominance of the Australian economy. Understanding the enduring impact of colonial socialism in Australian constitutionalism sheds light on how Australia’s distinctive political economy grew within a ‘Washminster’ system of government. It also provides principled guidance for future policy challenges that may require expansion of state involvement in the economy.

Culture, institutions and the long divergence

During the medieval and early modern periods the Middle East lost its economic advantage relative to the West. Recent explanations of this historical phenomenon—called the Long Divergence—focus on these regions’ distinct political economy choices regarding religious legitimacy and limited governance. We study these features in a political economy model of the interactions between rulers, secular and clerical elites, and civil society. The model induces a joint evolution of culture and political institutions converging to one of two distinct stationary states: a religious and a secular regime. We then map qualitatively parameters and initial conditions characterizing the West and the Middle East into the implied model dynamics to show that they are consistent with the Long Divergence as well as with several key stylized political and economic facts. Most notably, this mapping suggests non-monotonic political economy dynamics in both regions, in terms of legitimacy and limited governance, which indeed characterize their history.

Continuum of Carcerality: How Liberal Urbanism Governs Homelessness

A distinctive regime of the spatial governance of poverty is underway in Los Angeles, one in which the criminalization of homelessness is yoked to placements in carceral shelter and framed as the right to the housing. In this essay, we uncover the state violence inherent in such liberal urbanism by showing how such placements insert the unhoused into a system of carcerality while promising that they are the path to permanent housing. Seeking to trouble and critique the dominant paradigm of U.S. homeless management, Continuum of Care, we conceptualize a continuum of carcerality that stretches from encampment sweeps to seeming housing solutions. We find that the placements are a ruse, reproducing housing insecurity through exclusion, expulsion, and waiting, a structural condition that we term permanent displaceability. By focusing on an emergent mercenary entity, Urban Alchemy, and its expanding contracts for displacement and security, we show that there is a distinctive political economy associated with the continuum of carcerality. Our analysis is rooted in an ethnographic research methodology that centers the radical praxis of unhoused comrades. To this end, we foreground the demands of a homeless union that formed during the COVID-19 pandemic, UTACH, Unhoused Tenants Against Carceral Housing, which uses the framework of “carceral housing” to hold the state accountable to its promise of housing while refusing the carceral contracts that accompany such a promise. We take up their critique as an example of the ongoing reinscription of the terms of tenancy under conditions of global racial capitalism.

Cooperative enterprise at scale: comparative capitalisms and the political economy of ownership

Abstract Under what conditions do cooperatively owned enterprises scale to stand alongside investor-owned firms? This article measures and attempts to explain large cooperatives’ variable prevalence across high-income capitalist democracies. Controlling for other known social, economic and geographic factors, statistical models confirm that state-mediated institutional arrangements, as operationalized through two comparative capitalism frameworks (Varieties of Capitalism and Welfare Regimes), are a significant factor in this variation. Cooperatives scale in a manner that complements arrangements in coordinated market economies, while exhibiting institutional incongruencies with those of liberal market economies and residual welfare states. Public policies which have variously enhanced or inhibited cooperatives’ ability to coordinate to scale are compared across four case countries (United States, France, Finland and New Zealand). Policy differences are shown to reflect the joint effect of state-mediated institutional arrangements alongside other control variables. They reveal how states privilege some ownership forms over others, suggesting a distinct political economy of ownership.

The Regulation of Foreign Platforms

In August 2020, the Trump Administration issued twin executive orders banning tech platforms TikTok and WeChat from the United States. These were not the first actions taken against Chinese tech platforms, but more than any others, the ban on TikTok sparked immediate outrage, confusion, and criticism. This Article offers a framework for thinking about national security restrictions on foreign tech platforms. A growing body of important scholarship connects tech platforms to “regulated industries,” “infrastructure industries,” and “public utilities” and draws on principles from them to show how the regulation of tech platforms is not only viable but also has significant precedents and pedigree. Firms in these sectors — banking, communications, transportation, and energy — have long been subject to distinct and comprehensive regulatory regimes because they raise political economy concerns that are unlike those of ordinary tradable goods and services. In many of these sectors, there has also been a long and continuing history of legal restrictions on the foreign ownership, control, and influence of platforms — something that may be surprising, given the contours of the contemporary debate on tech platforms. “Tech neoliberals” object to placing any restrictions on foreign tech platforms because regulations would threaten the open internet. “National security technocrats” advocate for a case-by-case assessment of dangers, narrowly tailored mitigation measures, and audits to ensure compliance. Both of these dominant paradigms suffer from a variety of conceptual and practical problems, and neither take foreign tech platforms seriously as platforms, akin to platforms in other sectors. This Article tells the history of restrictions on foreign platforms in traditional regulated industries, critiques the dominant paradigms in the debate over foreign tech platforms, and offers an alternative — platform democracy. The platform democracy approach recognizes that democratic control of platforms is important and legitimate, given their distinctive political economy. Taking lessons and strategies from the history of platform restrictions, it suggests focusing on sectors before specific firms and applying structural separations rather than complex formulae for preventing national security harms. The platform democracy approach would also require efforts at international interconnection and domestic public investments.

Between elite reflexes and deliberative impulses: oil and the landscape of contentious politics in Ghana

ABSTRACT From the vested interests that have held back the promulgation of Nigeria’s petroleum industry for more than 17 years, to the sporadic stoppages that often frustrate attempts by the Kenyan government and Tullow Oil to truck oil from the Turkana region; grand schemes for petroleum resources often get entangled in a complex web of contentious politics. Nonetheless, the basic instinct of the predominant literature on oil governance has been to confine these contentious processes to the ‘black box’ of elite consolidation. Based on an in-depth account of the distinctive political economy drivers of reform in Ghana’s oil industry and the complement of Abdul Raufu Mustapha’s interpretation of the ‘multiple publics’ governing Africa’s public sphere, this article offers a pushback against this dominant narrative. It argues that the constitutive processes that drive institutional and policy reform reflect the impulses of contentious politics, instead of elite reflexes.

Penal controls and social controls: Toward a theory of American penal exceptionalism

This article argues that to explain American penal exceptionalism, we have to consider America’s exceptional levels of punishment together with America’s exceptional levels of violence and disorder, while understanding both of these as outcomes of America’s distinctive political economy. After specifying the multiple respects in which American penality is a comparative outlier, the article develops a new theorization of modes of penal action that reveals the extent to which the US has come to rely on penal controls rather than other kinds of punishment. This over-reliance on penal controls is viewed as an adaptation to the weakness of non-penal social controls in American communities. These social control deficits are, in turn, attributed to America’s ultra-liberal political economy, which is seen as having detrimental effects for the functioning of families and communities, tending to reduce the effectiveness of informal social controls and to generate high levels of neighborhood disorganization and violence. The same political economy limits the capacity of government to respond to these structurally generated problems using the social policy interventions characteristic of more fully developed welfare states. The result is a marked bias toward the use of penal controls.

Interpreting business mobility through socio-economic differentiation. Greek firm relocation to Bulgaria before and after the 2007 global economic crisis

This paper explores the roots of firm relocation through the lens of the differentiation of economic and institutional framework across countries. Specifically, it examines movements of small- and medium-sized enterprises from Greece to Bulgaria, by comparing the pre- and post-crisis socio-economic conditions between the two countries. A cultural political economy perspective facilitates a firm-focused approach to the analysis of distinct political economies by examining the business decisions for relocating. Drawing upon original data from a fieldwork survey conducted in 2014, it is demonstrated that firm relocation from Greece to Bulgaria has recently increased due to the divergence of the socio-economic conditions between the two countries in the aftermath of the 2007 global economic crisis. Firm relocation was not perceived as a solely economic decision; rather, it reflected several aspects of the Greek political economy. Overall, this paper highlights the crisis-driven disruption of the differentiation of distinct political economies through the study of business mobility.

Post-rentier Economic Challenges

The rentier states of the Middle East face a combination of political and economic challenges as they seek to reduce their reliance on volatile oil and gas revenues and diversify their economies. This article examines how the political economy of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states remains heavily dependent on the hydrocarbon sector and analyses the policy responses to the fall in world oil prices since 2014. Sections in the article examine the definitional aspect of rentier state theory, nature of the redistributive welfare state that developed in the 1970s in each Gulf State, and the political aspect of economic measures that seek to reform aspects of the distinctive political economy that has underpinned socio-political and economic stability for the past five decades.

Is the Price Right? Gauging the Marketplace for Local Sustainable Policy Tools

ABSTRACT:Local government sustainability has become a cause célèbre in urban policy. Extant research has attempted to construct narratives of sustainable environmental, economic, and social equity motivations by grouping together multifaceted types of policies adopted to deal with multidimensional problems of land use, transportation, energy, solid waste, carbon emissions, and other functional areas of local government. Yet, decades of policy adoption and implementation research suggest some policies or policy tools require a far greater commitment of resources and administrative and political buy-in than others. We explore whether the degree of such commitment reflects different motivations at play and test for distinct political economies for specific categories of energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction policy tools. We find evidence that the determinants for the two types of policies are distinct, and subsequent research requires refocusing theoretical and empirical efforts at differentiating “win-win” tools from more “altruistic” commitments to sustainable action by governments.

Addressing barriers in the water-recycling innovation system to reach water security in arid countries

As arid regions face increasing pressures on their water resources, the challenge of securing an adequate supply of good quality water to meet growing demands calls for innovative approaches that involve a diversification of water supply options and improved management of wastewater. Water recycling is a disruptive innovation that can help to achieve this goal in arid countries if the appropriate technical and institutional barriers are broken down. Within the water innovation literature, key questions remain as to the nature of the process and of the temporal dynamics of a shift towards decentralized wastewater infrastructure. This study offers insights into these mechanics using the Framework for Analyzing a Multi-level Innovation System (FAMIS), a cross-sectoral model that draws on the theories of technological innovation systems, system dynamics, transitions of socio-technical regimes, and evolutionary theories of technology. Cases from three water-scarce countries with distinct political economies—Australia, the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.) and Jordan—were used to document the dynamics of innovation in the water recycling system and identify policy solutions. Despite important contextual differences, in the three cases examined, actors and institutions have dynamically interacted to create a small niche where water recycling has emerged as a viable technology. Yet the application of the FAMIS model revealed that the dominant regime of water management has not been fundamentally altered due to blockages mainly at two “stages” of the FAMIS innovation lifecycle: the selection and adoption stages. We identified cross-geographical socio-technical and environmental characteristics and common mechanisms that strongly influence the evolution of water recycling technology through the innovation system. We find that the water-recycling technology evolves into the later stages of the innovation system in Australia, with the chokepoint occurring most importantly within the sophisticated but fragmented institutions that regulate water recycling. In the U.A.E., while agricultural reuse is widespread (to a larger extent than in Australia), major barriers occur earlier in the system, leaving mainly the water recycling technologies in the early stages of the system, where policy-induced path dependency block most selection mechanisms. With a wider infrastructural and institutional gap, Jordan may actually face less stringent barriers to water-recycling developments throughout all stages of the innovation system, namely influenced by international donors. Policy recommendations derived from this work to address barriers at the selection and adoption stages include favoring a coordinated institutional long-term vision and planning to overcome path dependence, enhancing social acceptance and adequate implementation of laws and regulations, and supporting data acquisition and model developments to build a stronger business case for water recycling.

More Behavioral vs. More Economic Approach: Explaining the Behavioral Divide between the US and the EU

While US courts and regulatory agencies have set sail towards what may be dubbed a “more behavioral approach”, their European counterparts still mostly navigate the charted waters of a neoclassical “more economic approach”, as first advocated in EU competition law. This paper claims that this “behavioral divide” can be explained by a theory of social norms and expectations. Two decisive factors are uncovered that drive the behavioral divide: first, the trust a society places in the self-ordering forces of individual and market behavior (ts); and second, the degree to which each individual is supposed to contribute to a cognitively demanding collective social project (cs), such as the construction of an internal market in the EU. A high score on either variable in this model leads to the adoption of a more rational concept of human agency. Historical changes in the social norms and expectations expressed by these variables can be credited for the inverse tendencies in the US and the EU. Arguably, the more individualistic social conception of the US leads to a greater sensitivity to empirical, i.e., behavioral findings. By contrast, the European political project has long been driven by the construction of an ever closer union on the basis of a single market. This overriding goal could significantly inhibit the long-term prospects of behavioral law and economics in the practice of European law. Other factors play a lesser role in the explanation of the behavioral divide: diverging mandatory risk regulation, differences in legal education, and the distinct political economy of nudging. The latter refers to the potential of bridging otherwise insurmountable political differences in times of political institutional gridlock by behaviorally informed legal strategies. However, this may well prove a potent force in the future if the EU continues on its deplorable path to an ever greater political and ideological divide. This political dimension may thus create a tendency cutting against the current move toward more rational models of human agency in EU law.

Gender and Re-partnering after Divorce in Four Central European and Baltic Countries

This article analyses the demographic and social determinants of repartnering after divorce in four Baltic and Central European transition countries (Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Hungary), which, despite their common transition paths after the 1990s, developed distinct political economies and have different gender and family cultures. The article explores how the re-partnering chances of divorced women and men are shaped by the social divisions of gender, parenthood, age, and education within various transition- society contexts. In general, the findings support the argument about the relevance and mediating role of the societal context in the process of re-partnering. Although we found an overall gender disadvantage in re-partnering across all countries, in more traditional contexts, parenthood undermines the chances of re-partnering for women but not for men. The negative effect of older age for re-partnering after divorce is almost universal for men, but is context-sensitive for women. Education does not affect women's chances of re-partnering, but it does play a significant role in the attractiveness of men in more traditional settings. The analysis is based on the partnership and parenthood histories recorded in the Generations and Gender Survey.

The geography of urban food retail: locational principles of public market provisioning in New York City, 1790–1860

ABSTRACTThis article contributes to discussions about the spatial organization of urban food retail on empirical and theoretical grounds. As a case-study, it presents new analysis of New York City's public market system between 1790 and 1860, documenting its expansion and geography relative to urban growth, and how the deregulation of the meat trade by the 1840s reshaped this vital infrastructure. More broadly, it theorizes the municipal market system's geographic principles, emphasizing its countervailing dynamics of agglomeration and dispersal. Exploiting the city's transition from a public to a free market model, it further demonstrates how distinct political economies produced profoundly different geographies of retail food distribution.

Education hubs and talent development: policymaking and implementation challenges

The discourse on the internationalization of higher education emphasizes revenue generation while neglecting other diverse rationales pursued by governments and institutions. For countries that are seeking to venture into a knowledge economy or accrue greater competitive advantages under globalization, many policymakers view cross-border higher education as a platform for developing human talent. In this pursuit, education hubs stand out as large-scale initiatives supported by extensive planning and investment. By comparing the developments of Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong as education hubs, three distinct objectives are apparent: to develop local talent, to attract foreign talent, and to repatriate diasporic talent. Despite the attention directed at the recruitment of international students, developing local talent remains a fundamental goal among education hubs. Talent development includes manpower planning as well as more inclusive provisions that support the diverse interests among local students. On the other hand, education hubs do not share the goals of attracting foreign and repatriating diasporic talent. Contextual factors such as distinct political economies and ethnic sensitivities mediate the recruitment of external talent. Comparing the policy rhetoric of talent development against the realities of implementation reveals sharp misalignment in some cases. More importantly, the political inertia in Singapore and Hong Kong exerts a gravitational pull that is increasingly turning sentiments against some foreign talent.

Comparing State-level policy responses to economic reforms in India

By rewriting the rules of economic governance in India’s federal democracy, economic reforms adopted in the 1990s have had far-reaching consequences on the relations between the Union (or central state) and the States. First, the dismantling of the centralised management of the economy has created greater scope for State governments to elaborate their economic development policies. Second, the reforms require cooperation from State governments and hence State-level politics and governance have taken on greater importance for India’s overall development trajectory. On the basis of fieldwork-based research, this paper discusses policy frameworks in four States (Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Kerala and Orissa) comparing and contrasting their promotional policies, aimed at attracting investments, as well as their approaches to structural reforms. For each case we explain political actions and discourse using a qualitative political economy approach. The article addresses a gap in the existing literature, which tends to focus on inter-State comparisons of economic performance. There has been relatively little academic attention to the comparative study of State-level policy response to the national economic reform agenda. One of the objectives of this study is to understand how subnational political elites, who now have more ‘policy space’ (if not necessarily more fiscal space), elaborate their economic development strategies in relation to the central state, on one hand, and to social forces in their political jurisdictions, on the other. We examine the social compromises that are expressed by these State-level policies, which provide evidence of the distinct political economies prevailing in India at the subnational level.

Neoliberal Suburbanism: Frontier Space

The paper selectively explores American suburbia, real and imagined, with a particular emphasis on the evolution of neoliberal thought and practice. It develops the argument that an inchoate vision of suburbia has been central to popularized versions of Chicago School economics since the 1950s, just as the suburbs have been privileged sites for the rollout of actually existing forms of neoliberal governance. While a distinctive political economy is associated with the American suburbs (suburban governance), in macroregulatory terms, suburbanization has also enabled a centrifugal politics of devolution and decentralization, exclusion, and secession, with wide and deep implications for politics, policy, and practice (urban subgovernance).

Penumbral Visions: Neo-Liberalism, Sexual Commerce and the Case of Indian Bar Dancing

Of late, the Indian state has adopted an abolitionist stance towards two forms of female commercial sexual labour - sex work and bar dancing. This article focuses on bar dancing and argues that although the judicial overturning of the ban against bar dancing in the Indian state of Maharashtra has been celebrated by feminists as a triumph of women’s right to livelihood over patriarchal demands of women’s sexual morality, the judgment is predicated precisely on a sharp distinction between morally ‘good’ and ‘bad’ female labour, namely, bar dancing and sex work, respectively. This is ironic given the striking sociological similarities between the two sectors, the social construction of the stigmatised sexual labour performed therein and the levels of state abuse inflicted against both sets of sexual workers. The article considers the usefulness of contemporary Western feminist vocabularies on the proliferation of sexual commerce under conditions of late capitalism in order to explain the increased tolerance for bar dancing on the part of both the judiciary and certain sections of the Indian feminist community. The article surmises that such tolerance has less to do with the totalising logic of neo-liberalism than a range of disparate factors including the distinct political economies of abolitionism pertaining to both bar dancing and sex work and the modes of resistance that female workers have offered in response. The article concludes by arguing that prospects for redistributive law reform for all sexual workers are dim unless the arbitrary legal distinctions drawn between markets in sexual labour are overcome.

‘Glocal boys’: Exploring experiences of acculturation amongst migrant youth footballers in Premier League academies

This article explores the experiences of acculturation recounted by migrant youth footballers following their migrations to Premier League academies. Whereas problems of acculturation have been documented in research exploring the migratory experiences of senior professional athletes, the framing of migrant youth footballers as a problematic collective in academic, public and media discourse has tended to deflect from consideration of the individual athletes in transition. By drawing on a series of interviews with migrant youth players from a range of cultural and ethnic backgrounds and their ‘acculturating groups’ ( Ward et al., 2001 ) of academy staff including Directors, Managers, Coaches and Education and Welfare Officers, I aim to explore the prevalent issues of acculturation associated with being at once a migrant, an adolescent, and an elite athlete, adjusting to the demands of an intensive physical training programme whilst encountering and negotiating an unfamiliar social and cultural environment. In conceptualizing the process of acculturation as the experiential facet of the glocalization thesis, the article reflects on the interplay between the distinct political economy within which youth players migrate and their individual experiences of acculturation.

Conceptualizing China's urbanization under reforms

This paper traces the new trends of urbanization in post-reform China that are incommensurate with those under the ex-socialist regime as well as those in other market and reformed socialist countries. Three paradoxical dynamics appear: a leap forward of urbanization concurrent with the under-urbanized feature, the massive and sustained flow of rural-to-urban migration concomitant with the bulk of migrants without urban citizenship, and the phenomenal reorganization of urban space and the proliferating addition of new cities with inclusion of ample rural attributes. These new developments present a challenging opportunity for theoretical construction. The paper elucidates extant studies, deciphering the ways that they interpret new features of China's urbanization under reforms. Integrating previous insightful but segmented perspectives on various aspects of China's urban transition, the paper argues that, to conceptualizing distinctive political economy of China's urbanization, one must incorporate the fundamentals of China's economic system that account for the historically contingent causes resulting in the dynamics observed.