Comparative political economy

Abstract

The Comparative political Economy is investigating the long-term transformation of capitalisms defined as a complex web of social, political and economic relations. It is an alternative to economics centered upon pure market mechanisms, which has become more normative than positive and failed to understand contemporary crises. The five institutional forms defined by régulation theory display various complementarities, and this is the origin of the coexistence of contrasted brands of capitalism, based on different hegemonic blocs. Consequently, rationality is context dependant and each socio-economic regime is constantly evolving under both endometabolism and hybridization. Emergence, maturation and crisis of an accumulation regime move the economy away from a steady long-term equilibrium. The contemporary process of globalization has strengthened the interdependance among contrasted regimes and sources of inequality between the USA, China, Europe and Latin America and other rentier regimes based upon the extraction and export of natural resources. This implies that macroeconomic modelling has to abandon the ideal of a grand and simple theory relevant to any country and any historical period. Mixing polity and economy is an imperative for any relevant research agenda on contemporay world. Mixing long-run national historical studies and international comparisons define an avenue for aiming at a general theory of capitalism.