EC453      One Unit
Political Economy

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

Requisites

Pre-requisites:

Students must have completed EC400 before taking this course.

Additional requisites:

In exceptional circumstances, students may take this course without EC400 provided they meet the necessary requirements and have received approval from the course conveners (via a face to face meeting), the MSc Economics Programme Director and their own Programme Director. Contact the Department of Economics for more information (econ.msc@lse.ac.uk) regarding entry to this course.

Students should have completed courses in intermediate level microeconomics, macroeconomics and econometrics.

This course proposes a broad overview of seminal papers and recent advances in the growing field of Political Economy. The course covers both theoretical and empirical works. Each lecture is organized around a theme, with themes changing every year as a function of recent debates in the scholarly community and current problems in the world. In the academic year 2025/26, topics will include elections in developed and developing democracies, the political affect of media online and offline, interest groups, populism, discrimination, as well as several lectures on politics in autocracies.  The course material will expand students’ capacity to think about policy and about relevant issues at the intersection of economics and political science.

1 hours of seminars in the Spring Term.
10 hours of seminars and 20 hours of lectures in the Winter Term.
9 hours of seminars and 20 hours of lectures in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

There will be a two hour mock exam and a revision session in the first week of ST.

At least two written assignment for handing in per term (assignment will include some work with data sets provided by the instructor).

Most of the reading is from journal articles; lists will be supplied at the start of each term. Two books are of particular interest for students to get started: T Besley, Principled Agents? Selection and Incentives in Politics, Oxford University Press, 2005 and T Persson & G Tabellini, Political Economics: Explaining Political Outcomes, MIT Press, 2000.

Assessment Pathway 1

Exam (50%), duration: 120 Minutes, reading time: 15 minutes in the Spring exam period

Essay (50%, 6000 words)

Assessment Pathway 2

Exam (100%), duration: 120 Minutes, reading time: 15 minutes in the Spring exam period

This course is IRDAP-enabled, meaning that resit and deferred assessments will take place in August 2026.

Students taking MSc Economics must take Assessment path 1 and will be required to submit the extended essay at the start of ST.