Political Economy

Course Description

Political Economy has two objectives. UWF states the first is to inquire into methods of analysis that borrow certain ideas from economics, such as self-interest and incentives, to the study of politics — the methodological objective. The second is to examine the reciprocal relations between government and the domestic economy, surveying what political scientists and public intellectuals have said about the effect of economic conditions on regime survival and elections, on the one hand, and on the other the impact of regime type and public policy on various measures of the general welfare such as economic growth, human development, and income or wealth inequality. Readings begin with excerpts from ancient and modern thinkers, then proceed to contemporary political scientists and political economists.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, CPO is the Comparative Politics prefix. The University of West Florida publishes this at 3 semester hours through the Department of Government, College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities. It is offered at approximately 2 Florida institutions.

⚠ UWF states the two objectives explicitly, and they are worth separating because students frequently expect only the second. The methodological half imports economic reasoning — self-interest, incentives, collective action — into political analysis. The substantive half asks how economies shape politics and politics shape economies. The first is a set of tools; the second is a set of questions.

The word "reciprocal" is doing real work in that description. Economic conditions influence whether governments survive elections and whether regimes survive at all; and regime type and policy choices influence growth, development and inequality. ⚠ Causation runs both ways, which is precisely what makes the empirical questions hard and why the course spends time on how anyone could establish an answer.

⚠ The methodological half is the more transferable and the more uncomfortable. Treating voters, politicians and bureaucrats as self-interested actors responding to incentives explains a great deal that high-minded accounts of politics cannot — and it is a model, not a description of human nature. A good course is explicit that the assumption is a tool whose usefulness varies, not a claim that people are only ever selfish.

The reading structure — ancient and modern thinkers first, contemporary scholarship after — is a deliberate and unusual choice, and a good one: it shows that current debates about markets, states and welfare are continuous with a very old argument rather than recent inventions.

⚠ The contact-hour figure is derived — the University of West Florida publishes none

UWF's catalog publishes a credit value in semester hours, the college and department, and prerequisites. It does not publish contact hours or terms of offering for any course. Every contact-hour value in a UWF guide in this repository is derived. The figure applies the standard lecture convention of 15 contact hours per credit, giving 45 hours for 3 semester hours. Confirm the meeting schedule and delivery mode with the department.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe political economy as a field and its two principal objectives.
• Describe the classical and modern origins of political economy.
• Apply economic reasoning including self-interest and incentives to political questions.
• Describe rational choice approaches and state their assumptions.
• Evaluate the usefulness and the limits of the rationality assumption.
• Describe collective action problems and the logic of free riding.
• Describe public goods, externalities, and market failure.
• Describe government failure, rent-seeking, and regulatory capture.
• Describe the median voter theorem and its conditions.
• Describe interest groups and their influence on policy.
• Describe bureaucratic behaviour and principal-agent problems.
• Describe the political business cycle and economic voting.
• Describe the effect of economic conditions on elections and regime survival.
• Describe the effect of regime type on economic growth.
• Evaluate the evidence on democracy and development.
• Describe measures of development including GDP and human development indices.
• Describe measures of inequality and their interpretation.
• Describe the effect of public policy on growth, development, and inequality.
• Describe varieties of capitalism and welfare state regimes.
• Describe the political economy of trade and globalisation.
• Evaluate competing explanations using appropriate evidence.
• Recognise reciprocal causation and the difficulty it creates for inference.

Optional Outcomes

• Apply the material to a current case or jurisdiction.
• Evaluate competing explanations and weigh the evidence for each.
• Write a sustained argument supported by cited evidence.
• Use AI-assisted tools appropriately and verify every citation.
• Present and defend a position in discussion.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• The field and its two objectives
• Classical and modern origins
• Economic reasoning applied to politics
• Rational choice and its assumptions
• Limits of the rationality assumption
• Collective action and free riding
• Public goods, externalities, market failure
• Government failure and rent-seeking
• The median voter theorem
• Interest groups and influence
• Bureaucracy and principal-agent problems
• Political business cycles and economic voting
• Economic conditions, elections, regime survival
• Regime type and growth
• Democracy and development
• Measuring development
• Measuring inequality
• Policy effects on growth and inequality
• Varieties of capitalism and welfare regimes
• Trade and globalisation
• Evaluating competing explanations
• Reciprocal causation and inference

Optional Topics

• Current cases and applications
• Competing explanations and the evidence for them
• Sustained written argument
• Verification and source evaluation
• Discussion and defence of a position

Resources & Tools

• The readings the instructor assigns — a course structured from ancient thinkers to contemporary scholarship lives on its reading list.
• Olson's The Logic of Collective Action — short, foundational, and the single most useful idea in the course: why groups with concentrated interests routinely defeat larger groups with diffuse ones.
• Acemoglu and Robinson's Why Nations Fail — the accessible contemporary argument on institutions and development; read the critiques alongside it, because it is contested.
• Our World in Data (ourworldindata.org) — free; growth, development, inequality and poverty data with the sources shown and the methods explained. Unusually honest about measurement problems, which is the part that matters here.
• World Bank Open Data, IMF and OECD statistics, and the UNDP Human Development Reports — free; the underlying series behind most claims in this literature.
• V-Dem — free; regime-type data to pair with economic data, which is exactly what the substantive half of this course requires.
• Journal of Economic Perspectives — free and open access; written to be readable by non-specialists and a good bridge into the economics literature.
• A UWF librarian — included in enrolment; an hour on database searching pays for itself across a whole degree, and it is also the fastest way to learn how to verify a source.

Career Pathways

• ⚠ Political science is a broad preparation rather than a vocational one, and it is more honest to say so than to imply a pipeline. The trainable skills are reading dense material fast, evaluating contested evidence, and writing a defensible argument — which is why the degree feeds so many destinations and guarantees none.
• Law — political science is among the most common pre-law majors, though law schools accept any major and care about grade point average and LSAT far more than field. Florida has eleven law schools.
• Government at every level (SOC 13-1041, compliance officers; 43-6014, administrative) — Florida's state agencies, 67 county governments and municipalities are large employers, and entry is frequently through analyst and management-trainee routes.
• Federal service — State Department, intelligence community, and the agencies with a presence in Northwest Florida. ⚠ Federal hiring runs on USAJOBS and on its own timetable; the Pathways programmes for students and recent graduates are the realistic entry route and are under-used.
• Legislative and campaign work — Tallahassee during session, congressional district offices, and campaigns. Frequently entered through an internship, which is the single most effective thing a student can do in this field.
• Policy analysis, advocacy and non-profits (SOC 19-3094, political scientist — note the occupation itself generally requires a graduate degree).
• International organisations, NGOs and development work — language competence is usually the binding constraint, and it is worth starting early rather than late.
• Journalism, teaching, business and consulting — common destinations that use the analytical training without requiring the subject.
• ⚠ Two pieces of concrete advice: do an internship, because in this field it substitutes for the vocational content the degree does not have; and learn a research method or a language, because a political science graduate who can also handle data or a second language is in a materially different position.

AI Integration

AI tools are genuinely useful in a reading- and writing-heavy discipline, and genuinely dangerous in specific ways that matter here more than in most fields.

• Where they help: summarising long documents, explaining an unfamiliar concept or institution, suggesting counterarguments to test your own position, drafting an outline, and checking whether your argument is actually followed by your evidence.
• ⚠⚠⚠ Where they fail catastrophically in this field: fabricated citations. Language models invent plausible-looking sources, authors, dates and quotations. Every reference must be verified in the library catalogue or database before it appears in your work — a fabricated citation is an academic integrity finding whether or not you knew.
• ⚠⚠ They are unreliable on anything contested, recent, or non-Anglophone. Political facts about a given country are frequently wrong in detail, out of date, or reflect the framing dominant in the training data. Verify against a country source, an area specialist, or a recognised dataset.
• ⚠ They flatten disagreement. A model will summarise a contested scholarly debate into a tidy consensus that does not exist, which is precisely the opposite of what a social science course is training you to see. Where the field genuinely disagrees, that disagreement is the content.
• They carry the biases of their sources. On politics, religion and economics this is not hypothetical, and a fluent answer is not a neutral one.
• Academic integrity: the course policy governs and policies differ. Read the syllabus, ask if unclear, disclose what you used when asked.
• ⚠ The professional argument for doing the reading yourself is not moralising. The trainable skill in this discipline is judgement about evidence and argument; outsourcing the reading trains nothing, and it is the one thing employers and graduate programmes actually test for.

Special Information

⚠⚠ The two objectives are different skills — do not conflate them

• The methodological objective is a toolkit: incentives, collective action, principal-agent problems, rent-seeking. These transfer to management, law, public administration and business and are arguably the most portable content in a political science degree.
• The substantive objective is a body of contested empirical findings about growth, development and inequality. ⚠ Contested is the operative word: the relationship between democracy and growth has been argued for decades without resolution, and a course that presents it as settled is misleading you.
• ⚠⚠ Reciprocal causation is the methodological heart of the course. Rich countries are more likely to be democracies and democracies may become richer. Disentangling that is genuinely hard, and the honest answer to many questions here is "the evidence does not settle it."
• Be alert to ideology on all sides. Political economy is a field where empirical claims and political commitments are unusually entangled. The discipline is to ask what evidence would change your mind — and to notice when the answer is "none."

⚠ Measurement is where most of the argument actually lives

• GDP measures market activity, not welfare. It omits unpaid work, ignores distribution, and counts remediation of harm as output. It is still the best single series available, which is why it persists.
• ⚠ Inequality measures disagree with each other, and the answer depends on whether you measure income or wealth, before or after taxes and transfers, per household or per person. A great deal of public argument is two people using different measures.
• Human development indices were built precisely because GDP was inadequate, and they carry their own weighting choices — which are political decisions presented as technical ones.
• ⚠⚠ Learn to ask what a number is actually counting before arguing about it. That habit is the most durable thing this course can give you, and it applies far beyond politics.

Transfer, articulation, and how Florida course levels work

In the Florida Statewide Course Numbering System the first digit is the level: 1 and 2 are lower division, 3 and 4 upper division, 5 and above graduate. ⚠ A lower-division course generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement. SCNS equivalency runs on the number and the content, so a course transfers as what it is rather than as what its title resembles.

Course format and position in the curriculum

• Lecture and discussion, with substantial reading and written work. ⚠ The reading load is the course, and it is where students most often fall behind irrecoverably.
• Ask about delivery mode. UWF offers substantial online provision; an online section of a discussion-based course demands more self-management, not less.
• UWF publishes no contact hours or terms of offering. Upper-division courses in small departments are frequently offered in alternate years — confirm the pattern with the department before planning a sequence around one.

CPO4074 is 3 semester hours at the University of West Florida.