The Political Economy Perspective

Abstract

(from the chapter) The political economy of aging is concerned with the social, political, and economic processes involved in the distribution of scarce resources and the ways that the state and market economy participate in shaping the redistribution effort (Johnson, 1999). It views the market economy and redistributory public policies as interlocking systems involved in the production of economic inequality. It also emphasizes that social actors engage the market from different structural locations, creating barriers that restrict employment opportunities and force less privileged groups to engage the market according to a different set of rules. The political economy perspective is particularly useful for exploring the ways in which economic inequalities accumulate over the life course and are transmitted across generations. It has often been used to examine differences in the ways that gender and class inform individual interactions with the market and the welfare state. Recently, the political economy perspective has been used to disentangle the challenges facing racial and ethnic minorities in market relationships and in the subsequent consequences for access to public and private benefits. Finally, a small but growing body of literature explores how marital arrangements and family structure reinforce and exacerbate inequalities produced in the market. Specifically, this perspective contends that individuals who enter into family formations that exist outside the once normative configuration of the male breadwinner and female caretaker model are disadvantaged both in labor market activities and during the economic redistribution that occurs in retirement. In this chapter, we first trace the theoretical origins of the political economy perspective. We then discuss two contemporary applications: the theory of cumulative disadvantage and the moral economy approach. Finally, we describe the welfare state as a system of stratification and examine differences in distributional outcomes according to gender, race, and marital status. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) (chapter)