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What is Global Political Economy?
Political Economy (PE) is the study of interrelationships between the economy and polity. International Political Economy (IPE) shifts the focus to the interrelations between national economies and polities. Global Political Economy (GPE) encompasses both. Like PE, it concerns itself with both economic and political outcomes and assumes these are mutually constitutive and interact in space and time. Like IPE, it frequently shifts its focus to macro-level phenomena. What makes GPE distinctive is that its unit of analysis is, first and foremost, the global economy and polity as it varies structurally and historically. That is, if citizen’s economic and political preferences are functions of their position in an economic system (PE) and if states aggregate these interests (IPE), then historically and structurally varying characteristics of the global economy and polity impact these lower-level processes. Theoretically, GPE scholars are agnostic, or at least heterogeneous, and draw flexibly from theories that originated in industrial transformations in Europe and elsewhere. Methodologically, GPE scholars are committed to the scientific method and draw broadly from both quantitative and qualitative approaches that encompass various units of observation, periods of time, and bases of comparison. Because almost any social (and socio-ecological) phenomenon is shaped at least in part by the global economy and polity, GPE scholars are substantively diverse but converge around common questions regarding the structure and organization of the global economy, economic development, inequality, the climate crisis, energy systems, and environmental change, population health, global governance and politics, and institutions.
Much of the research done by members of CSL is from a GPE perspective.
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