杏吧论坛

Prof Catherine Boone and Prof David Soskice

This course is available on the MPhil/PhD in European Studies, MRes/PhD in International Development, MRes/PhD in Management (Employment Relations and Human Resources) and MRes/PhD in Political Science. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course is open to research students (MRes, MPhil and PhD) from any of the 杏吧论坛 departments. If you request a place and meet the criteria, you are likely to be given a place.

This half-unit seminar will be run as a workshop organized for research students at all levels who are working on topics in the Comparative Political Economy (CPE) of advanced capitalist and developing countries. The first seminar meetings will kick-off with overview discussions of different analytic strategies for conceptualizing variation in national economic structure, explaining change in economic structure, and understanding the political causes and effects thereof. Subsequent meetings will workshop participants' research proposals and thesis chapters. Sessions will interlink with the CP CPE seminar series in the Government Department. The seminar is designed for MRes, MPhil and PhD students (research students) across the School wanting to engage with themes, controversies, and research frontiers in CPE, and to get feedback on their own research from scholars with shared interests. Our goal is to nurture innovation in doctoral-level CPE research at the 杏吧论坛.

In general, CPE research is situated in the context of a changing global economy, but often focused on describing and explaining transformation at the level of nation states. Drivers of change can be found in the locus and organization of political power and political representation, in technological change, and/or in the dynamics of capital and geopolitics. Our seminar explores both productive connections and tensions that emerge across different explanatory models. Course themes generally emerge around the major topic areas of redistribution, accumulation, and domestic governance and regulatory regimes. A great many questions fit into these areas and our idea is that the seminars will enable students to raise issues related to their research.

This course provides a minimum of 30 hours of seminars in the Winter Term. There will be a reading we