Suspended in 2025/26
GV517      Half Unit
Comparative Political Economy: New Approaches and Issues in CPE

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This half-unit seminar will be run as a workshop organized for research students at all levels who are working on topics in the Comparative Political Economy (CPE) of advanced capitalist and developing countries. The first seminar meetings will kick-off with overview discussions of different analytic strategies for conceptualizing variation in national economic structure, explaining change in economic structure, and understanding the political causes and effects thereof. Subsequent meetings will workshop participants' research proposals and thesis chapters. Sessions will interlink with the CP CPE seminar series in the Government Department. The seminar is designed for MRes, MPhil and PhD students (research students) across the School wanting to engage with themes, controversies, and research frontiers in CPE, and to get feedback on their own research from scholars with shared interests. Our goal is to nurture innovation in doctoral-level CPE research at the LSE.

In general, CPE research is situated in the context of a changing global economy, but often focused on describing and explaining transformation at the level of nation states. Drivers of change can be found in the locus and organization of political power and political representation, in technological change, and/or in the dynamics of capital and geopolitics. Our seminar explores both productive connections and tensions that emerge across different explanatory models. Course themes generally emerge around the major topic areas of redistribution, accumulation, and domestic governance and regulatory regimes. A great many questions fit into these areas and our idea is that the seminars will enable students to raise issues related to their research.

30 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

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

For formative work, feedback will be provided on the student's first presentation of their dissertation proposal or chapter.

(Recommended readings will be tailored for each student)

Anke Hassel and Bruno Palier, eds, Growth and Welfare in Advanced Capitalist Economies: How have Growth Regimes Evolved (CUP, 2021).

Jacob Hacker et al., The American Political Economy: Politics, Markets, and Power (CUP, 2022).

Torben Iversen and David Soskice, Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing capitalism through a turbulent century (CUP, 2019).

Carles Boix, Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads: Technological Change and the Future of Politics (Princeton, 2020).

Jonathan Rodden, Why Cities Lose: The Deep Roots of the Urban-Rural Divide (Basic, 2019).

Richard Baldwin, The Globotics Upheaval: Globalization, Robotics, and the Future of Work (London: W&N, 2019), Chs. 4, 7.

Catherine Boone, Inequality and Cleavage in African Politics: Regionalism by Design (Cambridge, 2024).

Adnan Naseemullah. forthcoming in 2023. The Political Economy of National Development. World Development (forthcoming).

Mark Thatcher and Tim Vlandas, Foreign States in Domestic Markets: Sovereign Wealth  Funds and the West (OUP, 2021).

Roselyn Hsueh, Micro-Institutional Foundations of Capitalism: Sectoral Pathways to Globalization in China, India, and Russia (CUP, 2022).

Frances McCall Rosenbluth and Margaret Weir, eds. Who gets what? The New Politics of Insecurity (CUP, 2021).

Gary Gereffi, Global Value Chains and Development: Redefining the contours of 21st century capitalism (CUP, 2018).

Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell, Invisible China: How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China's Rise (U. of Chicago Press, 2020).

Research paper (100%, 10000 words)

Each student will submit a 20-25 page (double spaced) research paper, dissertation proposal, or draft dissertation chapter as the basis of assessment for this course.