Historical Political Economy

Abstract

This chapter defines what historical political economy (HPE) is and is not, classifies the major themes in the literature, assesses the relative strengths and weaknesses of the literature, and points to directions for future study. We view HPE as social scientific inquiry that highlights political causes or consequences of historical issues. HPE is different from conventional political economy in the emphasis placed on historical processes and context. While the authors view HPE in the most inclusive manner reasonable, they define it to exclude works that are either solely of contemporary importance or that use historical data without any historical context (e.g., long-run macroeconomic time series data). The future of HPE is bright, especially as more historical data from around the world become available via digitization. Consequently, the future frontier of the field likely falls outside of the United States, which is the concern of a disproportionate amount of the current literature.

Historical Political Economy: Past, Present, and Future

“…HPE researchers now have their own journal (the Journal of Historical Political Economy) and Oxford Handbook ( Jenkins & Rubin 2023); convene for regular panels and conferences; and publish the Broadstreet Blog, an interdisciplinary endeavor of political scientists, economists, historians, and sociologists. Editors have taken notice: since 2010, the American Political Science Review, the American Journal of Political Science, and the Journal of Politics alone have published nearly 130 articles that focus on "history" (a concept that we make more precise below) and use either statistical methods to evaluate falsifiable arguments or formal theory.…”

Compared to what?: Setting American political development in comparative context

“…Many scholars of American politics look to solve these problems of inference using experimental or quasi-experimental research designs and quantitative analytical techniques that allow precise identification of causal relationships among variables (Pierson 2007). Practitioners of the emerging field of historical political economy are beginning to apply these tools to historical questions, both in the United States and comparatively (Jenkins and Rubin 2024). But these approaches still pose rather stiff challenges for scholars of American political development, who generally seek to explain significant outcomes in American political history, working backwards to uncover the factors that might be responsible for those outcomes (rather than starting with causes and looking for their effects) (Galvin 2020).…”