Chapter 10Political EconomyChapter Objectives1. Describe the r.docx

Chapter 10
Political EconomyChapter Objectives
1. Describe the relationship between governments and the
economy.
2. Describe different types of economic systems, including
capitalism, socialism, and command economies.
3. Examine measures of economic performance.
4. Identify the fields of comparative and international political
economy, including their major areas of research.
The presidential election of 1992 was an interesting one. Not
only did the incumbent president, George H. W. Bush, have a
stunningly high approval rating coming out of the Gulf War but
the election also featured a third-party candidate, Ross Perot,
who received the highest percentage of votes ever in American
history for a third party. The Democratic challenger, Bill
Clinton, was also an anomaly. A Democrat from the solid
Republican South, he had also been accused of sexual
harassment. Despite what would seem an easy reelection for
then president Bush, James Carville, one of Clinton’s campaign
advisers, summed up Clinton’s message for the voters quite
succinctly: “It’s the economy, stupid.” With America in a
recession and Bush having gone back on his pledge of “no new
taxes,” Clinton’s economic message resonated with the
American people, and Clinton handily won the Electoral
College that November. Political science research has
consistently shown that economic concerns are a primary issue
for voters—especially voters who ask themselves “Am I better
off now than I was four years ago?” when deciding how to cast
their vote for president. Thus, politicians are rightly concerned
with a country’s economy and challenged about how to respond
to economic pressures.
This chapter explores the very crucial relationship between
government and economy, the study of which is termed political
economy. Although certainly not an absolute rule, a government

cannot long be successful if its citizens suffer economic
hardships and poor quality of life. Although there have been
exceptions to this like North Korea, those states usually succeed
because of their authoritarian nature. We will start first with a
discussion of the connection between politics and economy and
then move to discuss different types of economic
systems, including capitalism and socialism. Although we
discuss these ideal-type models, the reality is that there is no
country in the world that is completely capitalist or completely
socialist; rather, types of economies fall on a wide spectrum,
having to do with how much each government is involved in
economic activity. Following this, we will discuss the ways in
which the government can be involved in the economy,
primarily through the tools of fiscal and monetary policies and
the types of factors that influence economic performance.
Finally, the chapter discusses two subfields in this area of
study: comparative political economy and international political
economy.What Does Politics Have to Do with the Economy?
Politicians care very much about how the economy is
performing. One theory of how people vote is based on their
experiences with the economy in previous years; if individual
voters feel like they have benefited economically, they tend to
vote for the person or party already in power. On the other
hand, if they are feeling the economic pinch or have been hurt
by the economy, people tend to vote for the person or party not
already in power. In this sense, politicians must be concerned
about the economy because it directly affects their chances for
reelection.
Politicians are also concerned about the economy for other
reasons. When the economy is humming along, governments
tend to take in an increased amount in taxes. Depending on the
spending priorities of the government in power, this can be a
powerful incentive to shape economic dynamics. When
economies are shrinking, on the other hand, governments almost
always have to become involved to soften the blow for its
citizens. An economist named Keynes recognized this in the

twentieth century, putting forth a model of a government-
economy relationship we now call Keynesian economics. In this
model, during economic downturns, governments should spend
money, thereby pushing funds into the economy, which can
lessen the impact of recessions or depressions. According to
Keynes, it would be acceptable for governments to deficit
spend, or spend more than they are taking in in taxes, in order
to spend more. As economic conditions improved and tax
receipts increased, a government could cut its spending and pay
off the debt that it had accumulated in the meantime.
Politics and government can influence the behavior and
performance of the economy in various other ways. The types
of tariffs, taxes on imported goods, implemented can encourage
domestic economic growth by making foreign goods more
expensive to buy. The type and amount of regulations that a
government enacts and enforces can make it harder or more
expensive for businesses to operate. For example, regulations
restricting the amount of pollutants released into the air by
factories, while good for the general health and the
environment, often require those businesses to make expensive
modifications to plants to reduce their emissions.Know a
Political Scientist John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes was an influential economist who
significantly affected the way in which politicians and
economists think about the involvement of government in the
economy. Born in England in 1883, he received a BA and MA
from Cambridge in the early twentieth century. He began a
career as a British civil servant by first working in India and
later serving as an economic advisor to Prime Minister David
Lloyd George at the Versailles Peace Conference after World
War I. Deeply influenced by his experience there, Keynes
criticized the economic burdens placed on Germany after the
war. High British unemployment and the ensuing Great
Depression caused Keynes to rethink his position supporting
free market systems with relatively little government
involvement. He published The General Theory of Employment,

Interest, and Money in 1936 in which he argued that
governments should deficit spend in order to promote full
employment as a solution to economic depressions. Although
not a political scientist by training, Keynesian economics, as
these ideas would come to be called, has influenced generations
of politicians, economists, and policy analysts. Keynes died in
1946 but was named to Time magazine’s TIME 100 Persons of
the Century in 1999.
Overall, however, societies cannot long survive, or survive
easily, without economic success or opportunity. Take for
example, the Middle East. Over the past several decades, there
has been a lack of economic opportunity and growth in many
countries despite the oil resources that they have. The benefits
of such resources are often misdirected in these countries to
ruling families or through corruption (we call this the resource
curse) rather than distributed to all the people. As a result, the
growing youth population of many of these countries have little
opportunity either educationally or workwise. This has made
that population vulnerable to the preaching of fringe and
extremist religious groups, which have destabilized several
Middle Eastern countries and whose effects have been felt
across the West. Thus, governments and politicians must be
concerned with and think about the state of their own economy
as well as the now-globalized economy to ensure the happiness
of their people and the success of their government.
Types of Economic Systems
An economic market or system is a framework of how firms
produce goods and consumers buy and use those goods. In other
words, an economy is a system of exchange. Wherever goods
are exchanged between people, some sort of economy arises.
However, these systems of exchange can be heavily influenced
and even regulated by states and their governments.
Governments can effectively institute the economic system they
believe will be most effective through economic policy.
This section identifies several economic systems, including
capitalism and command economies.

Capitalism
As a theory, or an ideal type, economies can exist outside of a
political system in what is often termed a free market: If there
is consumer demand for a good or service, some firm will
provide it with the costs of products or services determined by
the amount of supply in the market and the amount of demand.
When there is an excess of supply with little demand for a
product, prices would go down while when supply is limited and
demand is high, prices would rise. As coined by eighteenth
century economist Adam Smith, the “invisible hand” would
regulate the market without the need for government
intervention. These basic ideas form the basis of the economic
system known as capitalism. Jaeggi identifies five
distinguishing characteristics of capitalism:
1. “Private ownership of the means of production and a
separation between producers and the means of production;
2. “The existence of a free labor market;
3. “The accumulation of capital, and as a consequence;
4. “An orientation toward the exploitation of capital, thus
toward gain instead of need, toward the cultivation of capital
instead of the consumption of it or subsistence on it;
5. “Under capitalism the market typically functions as a
coordinating mechanism for the allocation, as well as the
distribution, of goods, such that capitalism and the market
economy are closely bound—though not identical—to one
another.”1
However, even at the time in which Adam Smith was writing,
there was widespread government involvement in the economy.
For example, in medieval feudal systems, states were built
around the distribution of labor by the peasants, to local
landowning elites, to lords, and finally to the ruling monarchy.
While loyalty and military service flowed upward, so did taxes.
These taxes allowed the aristocracy and the monarchy to operate
as rulers. Indeed, Adam Smith recognized that the object of the
study of political economy is to provide people and the state

with “plentiful revenue.”2 This revenue also allows states to
overcome the deficiencies of the free market—namely the
possibility of market failures. Market failures occur when an
economic market or system fails to produce or distribute needed
or wanted goods and services. Market failures tend to happen
most often when the provision of public goods, or
nonexcludable goods, are at play (recall the tragedy of the
commons from Chapter 1).
Although the virtues and values of a free market system are
often extolled, capitalism certainly has its critics. Jaeggi
identifies three major critiques: functional, moral and ethical.3
The functional critique argues that capitalism itself, as a
system, is intrinsically flawed and cannot function as a social or
economic system. When left unchecked, free market policies
allow for the existence of monopolies, or sole providers, of a
good or service that can drive up prices. Firms can also work
together to control the supply of a product and therefore its
prices. This sort of collusion among private firms can create
profits for owners and producers but leave those at the other end
of the spectrum in dire straits. This sort of economic inequality
can in turn lead to social inequality or even the inability of poor
people to advance in a society. In concentrating economic
power in the hands of the few, a large class of people are left
almost permanently “pauperized” with that population getting
ever larger leading to an eventual breakdown in society.
Another critique noted by Jaeggi is an ethical one—that the type
of life created by a capitalist system is in and of itself bad; “it
is impoverished, meaningless, or empty, and it destroys the
essential components of a fulfilled, happy, but above all,
‘veritably free’ human life.”4 Although this also sounds related
to the Marxist critique, Jaeggi notes that Marx was but one of
many people who took up this theme in the early 1800s. While
Marx’s solution was the abandonment of the capitalist project
altogether, others saw danger in such a proposition. If all
private property were abolished and people received only
according to their need, what incentive would individuals have

to excel, innovate, and create? In a capitalist system, the profit
motive encourages people to not just to do enough to survive
but do enough to thrive.
The Communist Critique
The moral critique of capitalism is that it is unjust and exploits
workers:
Capitalism exploits human beings by ‘depriving’ them of the
fruits of their own labor in an unfair and unjust way; in other
words, people are ‘enslaved’ by a system that in many ways
defrauds them of that to which they are entitled and coerces
them into social relations that are immoral and degrading.5
The moral critique is very similar to that made by Marx. Recall
from Chapter 3 that Marx saw in capitalism not just a system
that benefited private owners rather than producers but the
seeds of its own eventual destruction. Marx posited that once
capitalism created so much inequality, the working class, or the
proletariat, will come to realize the extent to which they have
been taken advantage of by the producing class, the bourgeoisie,
and initiate a revolution. Realizing the capitalism and private
ownership caused the severe inequality between classes, a
dictatorship of the proletariat would take control, begin to
abolish private ownership, and eventually transition into a
system of communism. Marx’s ideal form of communism
envisioned no private property, no money or wealth, and a
system of common ownership. In such a system, each individual
would receive what they needed and no more.
In their ideal forms, neither capitalism nor Marxist communism
will likely work. While communism as an ideal type has never
been attempted on a large scale
Other Economic Systems
Command economies represent those systems in which the state
controls all aspects of an economy from prices to what goods
will be produced in what numbers. Command economies have

existed and persisted in those countries that have attempted to
establish communist states: the former Soviet Union and today’s
North Korea. China is an interesting mix; in the middle part of
the twentieth century, they instituted a command economy but
have since introduced elements of capitalism and private
ownership. Despite these modest free market reforms, the
Chinese government remains heavily involved in their own
economy from owning hundreds of thousands of corporations
and businesses to artificially setting prices low or subsidizing
goods to prop up their export market. Proponents of command
economies see this method as a way to ensure development and
industrialization and to avoid the excesses of capitalism and the
free market. However, there are also significant problems with a
command economy, including the opportunity for corruption in
the higher ranks of government and perhaps even the inability
of the government to make sound economic decisions that
reflect the needs and desires of the citizenry.
Socialism represents a middle ground between social
democracy, discussed in the next paragraph, which retains a
capitalist-style market, and a command economy. Socialism
shares many of the same ideological concerns as does
communism, but as Shively notes, the split between the two
stems largely from the beginnings of the Russian Revolution
itself. “Marx and Engels had never fully settled whether they
thought the working class should take control of the state
peacefully through electoral victory or violently through
revolution.”6 Thus, the revolutionary elements, including
Lenin’s Bolsheviks, established communist parties while the
other branch of socialism continued to call themselves socialist
or even democratic socialists.7 Socialists today advocate for a
larger government role in the economy to include government or
public ownership of key parts of the market. Added to this is a
significant welfare infrastructure to provide services to citizens,
including a basic wage, education, health care, and housing.
Finally, social democracy tries to “balance capitalist markets
and private property with a greater degree of state intervention

in the economy… in an effort to ameliorate the economic
inequalities that the free market tends to create.”8 Social
democratic systems are in wide use across Europe, where a
greater degree of cooperation between the state and business is
found. In fact, Germany practices something
called corporatism, which is a formal system of cooperation
between business and government. Social democratic systems
supplement a capitalist-style market with a broader
redistribution of wealth; taxes are higher, especially for the
wealthy, but are used to more widely provide social services.
The idea behind such a system is to allow for the working of a
free market but to balance out the excesses and inequality of the
free market with a social safety net provided by the
government.CASE STUDY Germany
Although not directly written into Germany’s constitution,
businesses in Germany work closely with the federal
government in determining economic policy. Though very
broad, the term corporatism refers to formal and informal
mechanisms through which businesses and business groups work
and coordinate economic policy with a government. In
Germany’s case, corporatist practice stems back to the 1960s
and 1970s when the new Federal Republic (the democratic
portion of Germany that was formed post–World War II) was
experiencing its first recession. The governing coalition of the
Christian Democrats and Social Democrats initiated a series of
“concerted action” meetings that “brought business,
government, and labor together… to reach national agreements
about wage and price increases, broad macroeconomic and
social policy issues,” and a law on balanced growth.9 Although
business involvement in government policy occurs far more
informally now, Germany’s main banks have helped in
coordinating economic policy.
What about the role of labor in these arrangements? In some
ways, labor has a far more significant, formal role in business
policies. Codetermination “gives unions half the seats on the
boards of directors of all companies with more than two

thousand employees.”10 Representation in the boardroom,
however, does not automatically mean a seat at the table. Kuo
argues that the development of corporatist arrangements in
Germany has also been due to concerted repression of labor
organizations by businesses.11 Further, as Hauss and Haussman
note, other groups involved in economics issues such as
women’s rights, immigrant workers, and the poor are often left
out entirely.12 Finally, an argument can also be made that such
coordination is an undemocratic feature of Germany’s
government. Although government is involved in the decision-
making process, businesses, after all, are self-interested actors
that do not take all sentiments into account.
The Great Recession, which the United States and the world
experienced beginning in 2008, also hit Germany hard with the
German government forced into bailing out one of Germany’s
smaller banks. Not only did this hurt the corporatist
arrangement directly but it also exposed a certain element of
corruption that had emerged as a result of these practices.13
While corporatist practices may be on the wane in Germany,
they are still used widely in Scandinavian countries even
despite changing economic conditions.Critical Thinking
Questions
1. Why might cooperation between business and labor be
helpful in economic terms?
2. Who do you believe would have more advantages in
negotiating in a corporatist system, business, labor, or
government?
3. Given this arrangement in Germany, where would the German
economy fall on the continuum seen in Figure 10.1?Government
Involvement and Economic Performance
Some of the means through which governments can influence
the economy were mentioned at the beginning of this chapter:
taxes, spending, tariffs, regulations. Broadly, however, there are
two main types of government policy that affect the economy:
fiscal policy and monetary policy. The directions in which
states decide to go with both fiscal and monetary policy can

significantly affect the performance of an economy.
Fiscal Policy
Fiscal policy includes the mix of taxing and spending that a
state chooses to undertake. Taxes, although often seen and
portrayed as an all-around negative, can be used to both
encourage and discourage economic behavior. To understand
this, we can consider some different categories of taxes. The
types of taxes you are probably most familiar with include the
income tax and sales tax. In the United States, the federal
income tax is a progressive tax, meaning that the more money
you make, the more money you are supposed to pay. Sales taxes
are used by states and localities to generate revenue for their
actions and are often placed on goods and services. While a
sales tax on a haircut probably isn’t going to discourage you
from getting that haircut, there are other types of taxes that are
imposed for the specific reason of discouraging people from
using them. Sin taxes are taxes placed on “sinful” behavior like
alcohol, tobacco and cigarettes, marijuana, or even gambling.
When used as such, the higher tax is meant to discourage people
from partaking in the activity.
Taxes levied on businesses have a direct effect on an economy.
Particularly in a globalized world, businesses will seek out
locations in which they have to pay the least amount of taxes.
Governments would like to, then, create a mix of taxes that is
not just low but attractive to businesses and corporations to
bring them to their state or locality. For instance, if state A
offers a business tax of 20 percent and state B offers a tax of 35
percent, all else being equal, businesses are likely to choose
state A. With more businesses in state A come more jobs; more
economic investment; and, ideally, more taxes. This concept is
often called trickle-down economics, referring to the idea that
although businesses and richer people will benefit from lower
taxes, the economic benefit may trickle down to other people in
the community and the economy as a whole. Critics of the idea,
however, claim that businesses and those with higher incomes

will not reinvest the money they save via tax cuts and will
instead keep the economic benefits for themselves. Economic
research on whether tax cuts to businesses and others with a
higher income is mixed; on the whole, however, it has not been
supportive of the idea that tax cuts to the rich will filter down
to others.
Tax expenditures, or tax breaks, are another way in which the
government can influence economic behavior. Tax expenditures
include money that is foregone by the government because
people are allowed to claim a reduction in their overall tax bill.
In the United States, one major example is the home mortgage
interest deduction. Homeowners are allowed to deduct the
interest they pay on their home mortgage from the income taxes
that they owe each year; while the government loses out on that
money, they encourage people to buy homes, which can provide
other benefits to the economy. Tax expenditures can be used to
stimulate investment in certain areas of the economy by
encouraging individuals and businesses to partake in certain
activities so that they can deduct from their overall taxes.
Governments can also use tax penalties to encourage particular
behaviors. In the United States, one recent prominent example
is a tax that is enforced on people who do not have health
insurance in a given year. The 2010 Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act imposed a requirement on individuals to
have health insurance. One of the rationales behind requiring
people to do so is because of the basic concept of insurance
itself. People buy insurance in general in case certain scenarios
happen like car accidents, home damage, or problems with one’s
health. If those bad things do not happen, the money paid into
the insurance pool is lost, but if you run into one of those
problems, the insurance policy will pay for damages or costs.
Insurance companies, therefore, will often charge those at
higher risk more money and those at lower risk less money. In
the case of health insurance, health insurance for everyone will
be more expensive if only those who are at high risk of having
medical problems join the insurance pool; if, on the other hand,

all people are required to have insurance regardless of their
health situation, the costs for everyone will go down. While
there were a number of other reasons for enacting the
Affordable Care Act, this was the general philosophy behind the
individual mandate. In order to enforce this requirement, the
law requires people to pay a tax penalty if they do not have
insurance.
Many people complain about taxes in general; they don’t like
paying them, they think they can do better if they keep the
money themselves, or they don’t like what the government is
doing with the money that it takes in. Others believe that the
imposition of taxes or the usage of tax expenditures on certain
activities is in essence the government choosing who wins and
who loses in economy activity. Governments take in nearly all
of their revenue via taxes with that revenue used on things many
people cannot imagine going without using, including basic
infrastructure like roads, bridges, and ports; schools; military
and police protection; and other public goods from which no
one can be excluded.
Monetary Policy
Where fiscal policy determines a country’s taxing and spending
policies, monetary policy determines how much money is
actually available in a country. Restricting or enlarging the
money supply in an economy is done to control and affect
economic performance in terms of inflation, interest rates, and
unemployment. Inflation refers to a situation in which prices in
general go up, making currency worth less than it was
previously. It can happen for a number of reasons, but in
general, it happens “when consumers and governments have a
large amount of money to spend, relative to the supply of things
they want to buy.”14 Situations such as government deficit
spending, a shortage in significant goods, monopolies, and trade
restrictions can all cause inflation to increase. Although some
inflation in an economy is good, too much can cause severe

economic downturns and depressions. Thus, central banks, or
government organizations, which are in charge of setting and
determining monetary policy, endeavor to keep inflation low.
Monetary policy can involve several different tools. One way is
through the buying and selling of short-term government bonds.
When a government or central bank intervenes
to buy government bonds, they are putting money into the
economy; when they sell bonds, they are taking money out of
the economy. A second way is central banks can set benchmark
interest rates that can raise or lower the cost of borrowing
funds. When interest rates are low, borrowing money is cheaper
and can encourage more spending in the economy; when interest
rates are high, it can discourage borrowing and economic
activity. One way to think about this is in terms of one of the
most expensive purchases people tend to make: a house. When
interest rates are low, you will spend less money to get a
mortgage loan for the house, thereby encouraging people to go
out and buy houses. But when it costs more to get a mortgage,
when interest rates are higher, people are less inclined to go out
and make large purchases. Interest rates, then, have the ability
to encourage or discourage economic activity to help keep
inflation in check.
Another issue that is involved in monetary policy is
unemployment. Unemployment is not just a difficult policy
problem to tackle but it can be difficult to define. As of January
2019, the unemployment rate in the United States is 4 percent;
however, this unemployment rate includes only those who are
actively looking for jobs and do not have one. People not
included in this figure are those who have dropped out of the
job market for reasons including inability to find a job within a
specific time frame. It also does not include people not actively
looking for a job. Therefore, the percentage of people in the
United States without a job is usually some percentage points
higher than the official unemployment rate. A second related
issue is underemployment, or those who would like to be
employed full-time but are working only part-time. This has

been a growing problem for the United States in the wake of the
2008 Great Recession. Finally, some unemployment is to be
expected in any economy; therefore, an unemployment rate
below 5 to 5.2 percent is considered full employment by the US
Federal Reserve.
Governments must be concerned with the unemployment rate for
a number of reasons. One reason is that when there are high
numbers of unemployed, more government assistance, even if
temporary, will be required. This will increase the need for
governments to spend money on social welfare programs.
Secondly, high unemployment is simply inefficient in an
economy; “the economy would …

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