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Review Article
Open Access
Historical Political Economy: Past, Present, and Future
- Volha Charnysh1, Eugene Finkel2, and Scott Gehlbach3
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View Affiliations Hide AffiliationsAffiliations: 1Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA; email: [email protected] 2Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, USA; email: [email protected] 3Department of Political Science and Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA; email: [email protected]
- Vol. 26:175-191 (Volume publication date June 2023) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051921-102440
- First published as a Review in Advance on December 01, 2022
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Copyright © 2023 by the author(s).This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information
Abstract
A recent wave of research in political science examines the past using statistical methods for causal inference and formal theory—a field widely known as historical political economy (HPE). We examine the development of this field. Our survey reveals three common uses of history in HPE: understanding the past for its own sake, using history as a way to understand the present, and using history as a setting to explore theoretical conjectures. We present important work in each area and discuss trade-offs of each approach. We further identify key practical and analytical challenges for scholars of HPE, including the accessibility of data that do exist and obstacles to inference when they do not. Looking to the future, we see improved training for scholars entering the field, a heightened focus on the accumulation of knowledge, and greater attention to underexplored topics such as race, gender, ethnicity, and climate change.
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