Historical Political Economy: Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

A recent wave of research in political science examines the past using statistical methods for causal inference and formal theory—a field widely known as historical political economy (HPE). We examine the development of this field. Our survey reveals three common uses of history in HPE: understanding the past for its own sake, using history as a way to understand the present, and using history as a setting to explore theoretical conjectures. We present important work in each area and discuss trade-offs of each approach. We further identify key practical and analytical challenges for scholars of HPE, including the accessibility of data that do exist and obstacles to inference when they do not. Looking to the future, we see improved training for scholars entering the field, a heightened focus on the accumulation of knowledge, and greater attention to underexplored topics such as race, gender, ethnicity, and climate change. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Political Science, Volume 26 is June 2023. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Modeling Spatial Heterogeneity and Historical Persistence: Nazi Concentration Camps and Contemporary Intolerance

“…More broadly, our results are consistent with an emerging literature in European politics that shows that local-level factors play an important role in shaping out-group attitudes (Hoerner, Jaax, and Rodon 2019;van Heerden and Ruedin 2017;Ziblatt, Hilbig, and Bischof 2019;Ziller and Goodman 2020) while also raising the possibility that attitudinal and material consequences are distinct (Charnysh and Finkel 2017). They also contribute to the established literature on the legacies of regionalism in German politics (e.g., Hepburn Given the recent growth of historical persistence research in political science (Charnysh, Finkel, and Gehlbach 2023;Cirone and Pepinsky 2022), our argument has implications for empirical practice. A common goal in this research is to estimate unbiased causal effects, which is challenging in the face of observational data with unobserved confounders.…”

“…Given the recent growth of historical persistence research in political science (Charnysh, Finkel, and Gehlbach 2023; Cirone and Pepinsky 2022), our argument has implications for empirical practice. A common goal in this research is to estimate unbiased causal effects, which is challenging in the face of observational data with unobserved confounders.…”

Explaining Urban Order: The Autocratic Origins of Africa's City Street Networks

“…Studying the explicit design of built environments also suggests promising empirical opportunities for future scholars of urban politics. To those in the growing subfield of historical political economy (Charnysh et al 2023), the path dependent nature of streets in particular -with past state projects as-if frozen into the visible landscape -make them an especially observable means of exploring the legacies and footprints of state efforts to shape society. Moreover, if Scott's (1998) broader claims about legibility are right, the outcome in this paper -griddedness -should have its own important political effects, altering how grassroots collective action, state repression, and other forms of state-society interaction unfold across urban space.…”

Fixed Effects and Post-Treatment Bias in Legacy Studies

“…A prominent set of studies in political science shows that long-deceased coercive institutions often continue to influence contemporary political attitudes and behavior (e.g., Acharya, Blackwell, and Sen 2016a; Lupu and Peisakhin 2017; see Charnysh, Finkel, and Gehlbach 2023; Simpser, Slater, and Wittenberg 2018 for reviews). Reliably establishing legacy effects is challenging.…”