The papers in this special iSSU. e of Studies in Political Economy are, with one exception, drawn from presentations made at the SPE annual conference in February 2002. The conference objective was to provide a forum for public and scholarly engagement with the questions of political ecology and political economy.The papers provided a number of critical perspectives on the themes of sustainable...

This paper explores the political economy of anti-discrimination legislation during the ascendancy of the Civil Rights Movement. It traces the diffusion of state-level fair employment legislation and evaluates the relative importance of various demographic, political, and economic factors in promoting such legislation. The empirics indicate that non-southern states with higher proportions of un...

Political scientists increasingly recognize that multiple imputation represents a superior strategy for analyzing missing data to the widely used method of listwise deletion. However, there has been little systematic investigation of how multiple imputation affects existing empirical knowledge in the discipline. This article presents the first large-scale examination of the empirical effects of...

A political economic framework is used to describe an economy following transition to private ownership. The transition, characterized by massive privatization, is accompanied by a constitutional change, which is influenced by potential shareholders who may be described as the local entrepreneur, the corrupt entrepreneur, or the foreign entrepreneur. The constitutional changes influence the pri...

The field of political economy has long produced theoretically informed empirical research on the politics of international trade. For example, few books have enjoyed a better reputation than E. E. Schattschneider’s 1935 classic study of the Smoot–Hawley Tariff (Politics, Pressures, and the Tariff). Since that early date, trade politics has developed into a major subfield in political science. ...

This paper attempts to assess the international approach to Internet policy in the context of distinctive socio-political frameworks evolving in the US, the European Union (EU), and East Asia. The comparative review will develop a set of underlying structural models of the Information Society particular to each region, along with an analysis of their defining characteristics in relation to one ...

How does politics affect economic outcomes? This question has been asked probably as long as people have been interested in economics itself. Ž From Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776 or perhaps the Physiocrats . even earlier until at least John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy in 1848, what we now call ‘‘economics’’ was in fact generally referred to as ‘‘political economy.’’ T...

This paper develops a model where short-term reputation concerns guide the public disclosure of information and affect welfare in a coordination environment. Entrepreneurs use public information to make investment decisions, and there is complementarity in their actions. There are and high and low states that determine the productivity in the economy, and the high state is more likely if the go...

This essay develops a stochastic model of electoral competition in order to study the economic and political determinants of trade policy. Ideal policies of the different socioeconomic groups in society (landlords, industrialists, labor and skilled workers) are explicitly derived from a small open economy model. Then those ideal policies (trade policy and local public goods) are used to model t...

As agricultural products move from being economic commodities to quality-differentiated goods, price dispersion within specific markets increases and implicit subsidies from high quality producers to low quality producers are removed. This paper examines how these distributional effects can influence patterns of support and opposition to changes in marketing arrangements. The simple model devel...