International Political Economy - Lecture Flashcards

Vocabulary flashcards covering core concepts, theories, and scholars in International Political Economy (IPE), including trade models, monetary regimes, and the globalization backlash.

International Political Economy (IPE)

A field of study that refuses the separation of economics and politics, viewing the distribution of wealth and the distribution of power as the same question, while examining domestic actors like firms, sectors, workers, and voters.

Economic Liberalism (in IPE)

The perspective that voluntary exchange produces joint absolute gains, meaning an open international economy makes participating countries richer overall.

Mercantilism (in IPE)

An approach that treats wealth as the foundation of power and focuses on relative gains, asserting trade is beneficial only when it favors a state more than its rivals.

Critical Approaches (in IPE)

Theories that question who the international economic order was built to serve, focusing on economic distribution within countries as well as between them.

Factor Endowments

The relative abundance of basic productive inputs—such as land, labour, capital, and skills—that a country possesses.

Heckscher-Ohlin Model

An economic theory stating that a country exports goods that intensively use its abundant factor endowments because it can produce those goods cheaply.

Stolper-Samuelson Model

A model predicting that trade openness benefits owners of a country's abundant factors and hurts owners of scarce factors across an economy, producing broad class-based political cleavages.

Specific-Factors Model

A model based on the premise that factors cannot move easily between industries, predicting that trade policy preferences align by industry sector rather than broad economic classes.

Virtuous Cycle (Feedback Loop in Trade)

Helen Milner's mechanism wherein trade creates firms, workers, and investors dependent on trade, who then lobby for further trade liberalization, sustaining and expanding open policies.

Currency Regime

The institutional decision regarding whether a government fixes its currency value to an external anchor (such as gold, the dollar, or the euro) or lets it float freely in the foreign exchange market.

Currency Level

The valuation of a currency as strong or weak, determining whether it provides greater purchasing power abroad or makes domestic exports cheaper and more competitive.

The Impossible Trinity (Trilemma)

The monetary constraint establishing that a government can choose only two of three goals simultaneously: a stable exchange rate, monetary policy independence, and open financial borders.

Non-Tradables Sector

Domestic industries like services, construction, and transport that do not face international currency risk and therefore prefer floating exchange rates to preserve domestic monetary policy tools during recessions.

Bretton Woods System

The post-1944 monetary order that fixed major world currencies to the US dollar and the US dollar to gold, which collapsed in 1973 when the United States abandoned the gold peg.

Backlash Against Globalization

Defined by Stefanie Walter as a significant decrease in public, partisan, or policy support for globalization across economic, political, and social/cultural dimensions.

Politicization

The mechanism whereby parties and political leaders mobilize existing, stable antiglobalization sentiments, turning them into decisive heuristics, political identities, and voting cleavages.

Sociotropic Effect

A phenomenon identified by Colantone and Stanig showing that voters react politically to the economic distress of their broader geographic region rather than solely to their individual personal income.

Progressive Opposition to Globalization

Antiglobalization sentiment rooted in nonmaterial and normative concerns, such as opposition driven by worries over labor standards, consumer health, and environmental damage abroad.

Ideational Constraints (Goldstein and Mansfield)

The influence of deeply ingrained neoliberal principles among policymakers, which limited state intervention tools and made government compensation for displaced workers largely unthinkable.

Democratic Stressors (Milner)

The three pressures intensified by global capitalism—inequality, insecurity, and interdependence—that strain the core principles and survival of liberal democracy.