The Political Economy program offers an A.B. Degree in Political Economy that is jointly managed by the Department of Economics and the Department of Government. The interdisciplinary major in Political Economy exposes students to the rich intersection between economics and politics. Students study the social, political, and economic factors that affect and are affected by systems of production, exchange, and distribution, as well as the mix of values reflected in them.
At the heart of the major is the methodological and substantive overlap between economics and political science. Methodologically, political economy emphasizes rigorous and frequently quantitative methods, including formal modeling, econometrics, and comparative case study methods. Substantively, political economy analyzes how international and domestic political factors interact with macro and micro economic factors to determine outcomes in a wide variety of areas including globalization, international trade, international finance, regulation, development, taxes, institutional design, the environment, and income distribution. The scope of inquiry ranges from developed countries to developing economies, to nations making transitions to market-oriented systems.
The strength of the major is its ability to analyze important issues that do not divide neatly along the classic disciplinary lines of economics and political science. The intellectual enterprise typically goes beyond the constituent disciplines by combining traditional economic concerns about efficiency with traditional political concerns regarding distributional issues and legitimacy in markets and nonmarket environments.