Knowledge regimes and comparative political economy

Abstract

Comparative political economy in the 1970s and 1980s was largely about variation in the institutional arrangement of political structures or what we might call “policy regimes” (e.g., liberal, statist, corporatist).

More recently, researchers have turned their attention toward the importance of firms and their position within institutional arrangements or what we might call “production regimes (e.g., liberal and coordinated market economies). Scholars relied on their understandings of both policy and production regimes to account for variation in national economic performance. What is missing is a comparable discussion of “knowledge regimes” - the institutions through which policy-relevant ideas are generated and percolate into the policy process in ways that affect economic performance. This paper introduces and develops the concept of knowledge regime and compares knowledge regimes in different types of political economies.