In 2024, I had the opportunity to give three public lectures on Historical Political Economy (HPE)—one at IOEA and keynote addresses at the annual meetings of the Public Choice Society and The Shawnee Trail Conference. On each occasion, I focused on what I believed the new interdisciplinary field of HPE entailed.
In designing these lectures, I considered my own journey to HPE. And in so doing, the first half of each lecture became a reflection of how I came to be who I am as a scholar and how I have come to see the fields of American Politics (AP) and HPE.
In 2024, I was also putting the finishing touches on a volume that I was editing on Springer: Causal Inference and American Political Development: New Frontiers. The essays in the volume were based on a conference I ran at the University of Southern California in 2019, and the succeeding special issue of the journal Public Choice, in which the revised essays were published in late-2020. I also included three new essays in the Springer volume written by scholars of HPE. (More on all of this below.)
Editing the Springer volume gave me a chance to write up a portion of my lecture “reflections” and place them in a short Introduction to the volume. I clip a slightly edited version of that Introduction below. In it, I discuss my path to HPE, but perhaps more importantly, I attempt to articulate why the path to HPE from American Politics might be harder to navigate than the one from Comparative Politics. In short, I argue that quantitative scholars of American Politics—many of whom work in the rational choice tradition—don’t really have a developed and longstanding subfield of American Political Economy (APE) that might provide an easy transition to HPE. This is different from similar quantitative scholars of Comparative Politics who have a well-developed and vibrant subfield of Comparative Political Economy (CPE).
As a result, I argue that rational-choice-based quantitative scholars of American Politics who wished to incorporate history in their work felt they had two choices: either engage directly with the American Political Development (APD) literature—where history was deeply valued but which tackled questions from a very different theoretical and methodological perspective—or simply refer to themselves as “Institutionalists” or particular subfield scholars (“Congress scholars,” “Bureaucracy scholars,” etc.). CPE scholars with a historical bent, on the other hand, wouldn’t feel the need to engage with Historical Institutionalism (the APD analogue in CP)—their transition into the HPE field was much easier. The result is this: there is a lot of interesting American Politics work being done that would easily classify (in my estimation) as HPE. But those AP scholars are mostly tethered to their subfields in AP—Congress, Bureaucracy, etc.—and don’t naturally think of themselves as doing HPE or engage with HPE scholarship.
I draw this out in the Introduction to the Springer volume (edited and clipped below). One of my big goals in being part of the HPE field is to recruit American Politics scholars into the new (and fun!) interdisciplinary community. I believe non-AP-based HPE can learn a lot from these AP scholars. Just as these AP scholars (and the AP field) can learn a lot from the CP scholars working within HPE.
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In January 2019, I assembled a group of scholars at the University of Southern California to participate in a conference on Causal Inference and American Political Development. These scholars, all of whom studied American Politics and had broad social-scientific training, presented research that explored how causal inference (CI), a burgeoning analytical and methodological approach in the social sciences, lent itself to the study of American Political Development (APD), a particular conceptual and theoretical approach to the study of how the United States has evolved over time. Eleven papers were presented and critiqued, and those papers were revised and became the basis (along with an opening essay by Nolan McCarty, Charles Stewart III, and myself and two concluding essays by Daniel Galvin and Eric Schickler) of a special issue of the journal Public Choice (Volume 185, Issue Nos. 3-4, published in December 2020).
As many of the authors discussed, CI and APD do not easily go together. For example, Caughey and Chatfield (2020: 359) noted: “both causal inference and APD are centrally interested in questions of causation, but they approach causation with very different ontological and epistemological commitments.” Specifically, while CI scholars typically incorporate careful, experiment-based research designs to produce “average effects of discrete, manipulable ‘treatments’” (Caughey and Chatfield 2020: 360), APD scholars have traditionally focused on “large, complex, normatively significant questions about historical processes and institutions – ques- tions that typically are not well-suited to a crisply defined design-based inference about the effect of a specific ‘treatment’” (Schickler 2020: 502). Nonetheless, many—if not all—of the authors made headway in considering how scholars inter- ested in both CI and APD might find common and productive ground.
I was very pleased with the way the conference and the special issue of Public Choice came together. And the articles proved to be influential. Many were assigned in graduate classes and helped shape how scholars thought about CI, APD, and broader theoretical and methodological aspects of social science. Thus, several years after the special issue’s publication, I sought to make the articles as widely available as possible. I believed some potential readers might miss a special issue of Public Choice, so I wanted to give them a second bite at the apple—in a different format. I approached Lorraine Klimowich at Springer and explained my reasoning for creating an edited volume, and she agreed to work with me to make it happen.
But the world has not remained static since the conference was held in 2019 and the revised papers were published in 2020. So I gave the authors a chance to revise and update their papers, and most did (at least marginally). But more importantly, the influence of the CI movement on social science has increased since 2020. New CI textbooks have spread the standard toolkit of estimator types and designs (Beuno de Mesquita and Folwer 2021; Cunningham 2021; Huntington-Klein 2022; Blair, Coppock, and Humphreys 2023), and the degree to which the scholarly community expects authors to focus on causal effects has grown considerably (Imbens 2024; Goldsmith-Pinkam 2024).
During the same time, a new interdisciplinary field known as Historical Political Economy (HPE) has emerged to provide a community for those scholars who work at the intersection of political science, economics, and history.1 The earliest propo- nents of HPE were assistant professors on the east coast of the United States—like Alexandra Cirone, Emily Sellars, Volha Charnysh, and Pavithra Suryanarayan— who worked in the comparative politics (CP) field. Rather than think about how political science and history might intersect on important questions from a Historical Institutionalist perspective (the comparative analog to APD), they took an economics-based (or rational choice) approach. This was natural for them, as comparative political economy (CPE) had long existed as a subfield within CP. These junior scholars were very well trained in CI techniques, but they also cared deeply about history and getting the story right.
As I noticed these junior CPE scholars and their initial efforts to build an interdisciplinary field, I recognized that American Politics (AP) had similar, latent efforts for some time. Rational-choice-based studies of historical institutions had been around for a while in AP—much of my own work was in this vein (e.g., Jenkins 1998, 1999, 2000; Jenkins and Stewart 2002, 2013)—but because AP never had a meaningful American Political Economy (APE) field, scholars in this tradition often characterized themselves as doing “quantitative APD.”2 But they were not doing APD in the strict sense, since APD stems from sociology (and, to a lesser extent, public law and normative theory) whereas rational choice is rooted in economic theory and analysis.
In 2020, I began to take a leadership role in building an interdisciplinary HPE field. I started by helping to develop an HPE blog called Broadstreet, which provided short overviews of important HPE research. In 2021, I founded a new journal devoted to HPE research: the Journal of Historical Political Economy. The following year, Jared Rubin and I co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy,3 and in 2024, we began an HPE book series on Cambridge University Press. Finally, in October 2024, Allison Spencer Hartnett and I co-organized the First Annual HPE Conference at the University of Southern California.
As I circled back to create this edited volume, my recent foray into HPE helped me rethink a bit what was accomplished with the 2019 conference and 2020 special issue of Public Choice. I believe there has been an interest in rational-choice-based historical analysis in American Politics for some time, and the CI movement has only shifted the way those analyses are done. What I think the 2019 conference and the 2020 special issue did was help make the case for AP’s importance within HPE. As the HPE subfield has developed, the majority of studies has focused on events outside the United States. This has been natural, in my mind, thanks to the existence of CPE and the absence of APE. But AP-based HPE scholars have a lot to contribute to the new field, and providing venues for them to make their case is important. I hope this volume in particular will build more AP interest—and make clear AP’s role—in the burgeoning HPE movement.
I believe it is also important for AP scholars not to be too inward looking. Just as AP has a lot to give to HPE, non-AP HPE has a lot to give to AP. Thus, I have added three essays at the end of this volume, which were not part of the 2019 conference or the 2020 special issue of Public Choice. They represent “Views from HPE” and are written by top CP scholars who work within the HPE field: Alexandra Cirone, Aditya Dasgupta, and David Stasavage. They offer fresh insights on how scholars from different fields and traditions might learn from and complement one another.
Thus, going forward, I think an HPE approach to APD might be best thought of as “historically oriented APE”—in the same way that CPE scholars seamlessly integrate history into their normal mode of research. Stated differently, quantitative AP scholars with a CI focus might consider APD as an area of study rather than a theoretical approach. This is not to say that traditional APD topics of interest—like timing, order, and sequence—are not useful to incorporate. But, rather, quantitative AP scholars interested in history should not feel compelled to adopt such topics—for them, APD can be thought of as “United States political-economic development,” and thus a subject of interest rather than a theoretical paradigm. In this way, AP can stand alongside CP as equals in the development of the interdisciplinary field of HPE.
References
Beuno de Mesquita, E., & Fowler., A. (2021). Thinking clearly with data: A guide to quantitative reasoning and analysis. Princeton University Press.
Blair, G., Coppock, A., & Humphreys, M. (2023). Research design in the social sciences: Declaration, diagnosis, and redesign. Princeton University Press.
Caughey, D., & Chatfield, S. (2020). Causal inference and American political development: Contrasts and complementarities. Public Choice, 185(3–4), 359–376.
Cunningham, S. (2021). Causal inference: The mixtape. Yale University Press.
Goldsmith-Pinkham, P. (2024). Tracing the credibility revolution across fields. Working paper. https://paulgp.github.io/papers/tracking_revolution.pdf
Huntingon-Klein, N. (2022). The effect: An introduction to research design and causality. CRC Press.
Imbens, G. W. (2024). Causal inference in the social sciences. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Applications, 11, 123–152.
Jenkins, J. A. (1998). Property rights and the emergence of standing committee dominance in the nineteenth-century house. Legislative Studies Quarterly, 23(4), 493–519.
Jenkins, J. A. (1999). Examining the bonding effects of party: A comparative analysis of Roll-Call voting in the U.S. and Confederate Houses. American Journal of Political Science, 43(4), 1144–1165.
Jenkins, J. A. (2000). Examining the robustness of ideological voting: Evidence from the Confederate House of representatives. American Journal of Political Science, 44(4), 811–822.
Jenkins, J.A., & Charles Stewart, III. (2002). Order from Chaos: The Transformation of the Committee System in the House, 1816-1822.” In David W. Brady and Mathew D. McCubbins, eds., Party, Process, and Political Change in Congress: New Perspectives on the History of Congress. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Jenkins, J. A., & Charles Stewart, III. (2013). Fighting for the speakership: The house and the rise of party government. Princeton University Press.
Jenkins, J. A., & Rubin, J. (2024). Historical political economy: What is it? In J. A. Jenkins & J. Rubin (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Historical Political Economy. Oxford University Press.
Krause, G. A. (2020). Why is political economy a subfield in comparative politics and international relations, but not in American politics? Lessons from the past, prescriptions for the future. Journal of Political Institutions and Political Economy, 1(3), 449–475.
Schickler, E. (2020). Causal inference and American political development: Common challenges and opportunities. Public Choice, 185(3-4), 501–511.
Jenkins and Rubin (2024: 3) provide a more elaborate definition: “At its core, HPE is an interdisciplinary endeavor. It combines insights from history, economics, political science, and occasion- ally other social sciences, such as sociology and anthropology. In short, HPE is the study of how political and economic actors and institutions have interacted in the past or over time. It differs from much of economic history in that it focuses on the causes and consequences of politics. It departs from much of conventional political economy in that its context is strictly historical, even when it has implications for contemporary political economy. It also departs from much of history in its use of social scientific theory and methods. Thus, while HPE involves elements of the traditional fields of economics, political economy, and history, it is separate from—and integrative of—them.”
As to why Political Economy never developed as a meaningful subfield in American Politics, see Krause (2020). [Note that a new APE subfield has emerged in the last few years under the leadership of Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, and several others. But this APE subfield—which has evolved into an organized APSA section—is more in keeping with Historical Institutionalism. And it has a bit of a normative/ideological tinge as well.]
The Handbook went online in 2022 with the hardback following in 2024.