Political Economy Approach — meaning and the two strands

What it studies

Karl Marx: political economy is “an interdisciplinary study drawing upon economics, law and political science.” Oxford Handbook: “the study of economic policies of the state and its political and economic processes.”

Evolution: Kautilya’s Arthashastra → mercantilism → Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations, 1776 — modern political economy begins) → David Ricardo (comparative advantage) → Marx (Capital; surplus value) → Keynes (welfare) → Lenin (Imperialism) → Hayek and Friedman (neoliberalism).

The fault line inside political economy

Political Economy — the development debate

Modernisation theory

Liberal political economy feeds modernisation; prominent post-WWII (the Marshall Plan). A traditional → modern dichotomy (particularism / ascription → universalism / achievement). Scholars: Weber, Parsons, Rostow, Apter, Lipset, Pye, Almond, Verba.

Assumptions: homogenising, irreversible, progressive, lengthy. Critique: Eurocentric; a Cold-War motive (Rostow’s subtitle — “A Non-Communist Manifesto”); determinism.

Dependency theory

Underdevelopment is produced by exploitative ties, not by backwardness. Paul Baran (wealth extraction); Andre Gunder Frank (1967) — a metropole–satellite chain, wealth flowing periphery → core; Walter Rodney (1972); Malcolm Caldwell (1977). Critique: over-weights external factors; treats the periphery as homogenous; cannot explain peripheral success stories.

World-systems analysis (Immanuel Wallerstein)

A single capitalist world-economy since the 16th c., built on a division of labour: core (strong states) — semi-periphery — periphery (raw-material exporters). Strong core states extract surplus; multilateral, not merely bilateral. Critique: system determinism; neglects agency; over-centres market over production.

Recent turns: Christopher Chase-Dunn (the inter-state system); Andre Gunder Frank (a system older than the 16th c., with Asian origins); Janet Abu-Lughod (the medieval Middle East as centre; Europe peripheral).

Modes of production & the state-centred school

• Modes of production: relations of production (slave–master, serf–lord, wage-labour–capitalist); a social formation combines modes; capitalism restructures but does not erase pre-capitalist modes (articulation).
• State-centred (Poulantzas, Miliband, Hamza Alavi, Pranab Bardhan, Issa Shivji): the relative autonomy of the state; the state as an arena of class struggle; Alavi’s overdeveloped post-colonial state (Pakistan, Bangladesh). Instrumentalist (Miliband) vs structuralist (Poulantzas).

Neoliberal approach

Minimal state, free markets, privatisation; Structural Adjustment Programmes (World Bank, IMF); good governance as a development precondition. Critique: one-size-fits-all SAPs; inequality and social cost; prioritising market freedom may crowd out democracy.

Political Economy — significance and limits

Harold Lasswell‘s “who gets what, when and how” makes the economics–politics partnership unavoidable. Political economy reads state macro-policy, tariff structures and the domestic–global interface; it is at once qualitative and quantitative, empirical and prescriptive, with a mathematical bent that yields more testable theory.

Three contributions in comparative politics (Schumpeter)

(1) an analytical lens prioritising regularities and causal mechanisms; (2) insight into the corporation–government interaction — why policy differs across autocracies and democracies; (3) how global economic integration alters government decisions. Schumpeter: “an exposition of a comprehensive set of economic politics on the strength of certain unifying normative principles.”

Limits: economic determinism; neglect of normative and constitutional questions; ideological colouring (e.g. Piketty); Lane Kenworthy — ignores historical, political and cultural context; the modes-of-production comparison takes a functional twist that erases human agency.

Political Sociology Approach — state and society

What it is

A. K. Mukhopadhyay: “a marriage of political science and sociology, wherein the child contains features of both disciplines, but is also different from its parents.” S. M. Lipset: political science starts with the state and asks how it affects society; political sociology starts with society and asks how it affects the state.

• Robert Dowse and John Hughes: “the study of political behaviour within a sociological perspective or framework.”
• Michael Rush and Philip Althoff: the linkages between social structure and political structure, social and political behaviour.
• N. J. Smelser: the interrelationship between society and polity, social structures and political institutions.

Origins: the mid-19th c., under the Industrial Revolution (Lipset and Runciman). Karl Marx lays the foundation of modern political sociology — grasp the basic structure of society to grasp politics; caste–class ties shape politics; the political superstructure rests on the economic base.

Early critics of Marxism turned to elites, parties and voting: Vilfredo Pareto (circulation of elites), Gaetano Mosca (the ruling class), Robert Michels (the “iron law of oligarchy”), Max Weber (bureaucracy, authority). Within Marxism: instrumentalist (Miliband), structuralist / relative-autonomy (Poulantzas), and Gramsci‘s “integral state.”

Political Sociology — India, significance and the return of the state

Indian scholarship

Rajni Kothari (caste and the party system), Andre Beteille (social structure, class, inequality), Paul Brass (parties), Yogendra Yadav (OBC politics), Christophe Jaffrelot (caste and religion).

Significance

Best fit for the developing world, where social structure drives politics; Maurice Duverger — the approach seeks the political within the wider social, affirming the unity of the sciences; empirical rather than philosophical; explains how castes, religions, linguistic groups and social movements wield power.

Criticism — social reductionism

Privileging society over the state disperses the state’s autonomous character. Samuel P. Huntington: the “social stratification” reading of politics is a form of “sociological reductionism” that ignores institutions and culture. Behaviouralism deepened the decline by sidelining the state.

Bringing the state back in

Theda Skocpol: a return to the state as an entity apart from social forces, with its own interests and capacities; Guillermo O’Donnell‘s bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes depoliticised society to drive modernisation. This fed neo-institutionalism (March and Olsen, Bringing Institutions Back, 1985): institutions as norms and practices, not just structures.

Contemporary political sociology

Close to “cultural politics” — what events mean to those who act on them. Lipset and Rokkan (1967): historical shocks (the Reformation, national revolutions, industrialisation) created durable cleavages that froze European party systems. Almond and Verba (1965): political culture is the distribution of individual attitudes; short-run stability needs a compatible culture.