Modern Political Economy: A Brief History and Some Applications

Abstract

Modern political economy attempts to understand the political sphere using tools and approaches initially developed in economics. Over time, this subdiscipline has developed many of its own hybrid tools in analyzing politics. Non-economists often refer to the approach as "rational choice," a label that describes its fundamental precepts: rationality and choice among individual decision makers. It is also widely known as "public choice," owing to an early group of midcentury scholars searching for a moniker for their new journal, which did indeed become Public Choice, now in its 56 th year of publication. The rationale for this latter title aims at differentiating this new disciplinary field from private choice, the latter being the domain of most economic analysis.It is not unreasonable to think of this subdiscipline as the "economic theory of politics," as it is also sometimes called. Indeed, modern political economy has attracted adherents in both economics and political science, and has appealed to some sociologists (

Climate Change, Identity Conflicts and the Politics of Cosmopolitanism in Nigeria

“…Class conflict theory is concerned with the complexity of social interests and how social hierarchies evolve. The theory posits that no society exists without experiencing change, and that such process of change takes place through conflicts based on the unequal class relations of people to the means of production in a given society ( Jakee 2021;Akpan & Nnorom 2019). These relations highlight different livelihoods, positions and settlement patterns in the society with some people classed as owners or renters, capitalists or workers, mobile or settled in the course of production.…”