Open economy politics: A critical review

2009/05/27 by David A. Lake · 383 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Economics #Epistemology #International Development and Aid #Law #Local Government Finance and Decentralization #Paradigm shift #Philosophy #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Positive economics #Sociology #State Capitalism and Financial Governance

paper · pdf · doi:10.1007/s11558-009-9060-y

published in The Review of International Organizations 4(3), 219-244 (Springer Science+Business Media)

openalex publication_date 2009/05/27 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/02

Abstract

An emergent paradigm, referred to as Open Economy Politics (OEP), now structures and guides research among many scholars. This essay sketches the general contours of the paradigm. Scientific accumulation is, in my view, the potential and great benefit of a self-conscious understanding of OEP as a single, unifying paradigm. The essay also provides a sympathetic critique of OEP and shows how the paradigm can be extended to capture some of the concerns and insights of other critics. Most important, this critique highlights the role and consequences of certain simplifying assumptions commonly used in OEP and calls for a closer examination of how international institutions and policies structure and change the interests of actors within countries that are now taken as exogenous.

Citations

• The Theory of Economic Regulation
• The second image reversed: the international sources of domestic politics
• International regimes, transactions, and change: embedded liberalism in the postwar economic order
• Sectoral conflict and foreign economic policy, 1914–1940
• Diplomacy and domestic politics: the logic of two-level games
• The Rational Design of International Institutions
• Has Globalization Gone Too Far?
• The old IPE and the new
• Partisan Politics in the Global Economy
• State Power and the Structure of International Trade
• Mid-Atlantic: Sitting on the knife's sharp edge
• Ontology, methodology, and causation in the American school of international political economy

Cited by

• “The persistent myth of lost hegemony,” revisited: structural power as a complex network phenomenon
• The IPE of money revisited
• Regaining relevance: IPE and a changing global political economy
• The new interdependence approach: theoretical development and empirical demonstration
• Toward a political economy of complex interdependence
• Going Nativist: How Nativism and Economic Ideology Interact to Shape Beliefs about Global Trade
• Arresting the Opposition: Labor Repression and Trade Liberalization in Developing Countries
• Occupation and the Political Economy of Trade: Job Routineness, Offshorability, and Protectionist Sentiment
• Should We Leave Behind the Subfield of International Relations?
• Partial Hegemony
• International political economy [wikipedia]

Related

• Open economy politics and trade policy
• Mid-Atlantic: Sitting on the knife's sharp edge
• Regaining relevance: IPE and a changing global political economy
• The old IPE and the new
• Trade, Democracy, and the Size of the Public Sector: The Political Underpinnings of Openness