This introduction grounds the middle-income (MI) trap by looking at the empirical realities of firms, sectors, national, and subnational institutions embedded in global value chains (GVCs). While MI-trap scholarship has shed light on macro-structural constraints, it often overlooks international production structures and micro-level agency. GVC research, in turn, captures firm strategies and governance structures but tends to underplay the role of domestic institutions and political coalitions. This Special Issue brings these two traditions into dialogue in order to examine how upgrading is (partially) attained—or how it fails—in MI countries.

The articles in the Issue focus on six countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, China, Malaysia, and Mexico—to analyze how public and private actors pursue upgrading strategies under MI-trap conditions. We develop a typology of Actors’ Upgrading Strategies along two dimensions: loci of agency (state vs. firm/chain) and modes of action (transformative vs. adaptive). This yields four conceptual categories: Transformative Policy Entrepreneurs, Adaptive Policy Implementers, Transformative Firm Upgraders, and Incremental Firm Repositioners. Collectively, the contributions offer a more textured and politically attuned understanding of upgrading under the MI trap in a world of GVCs, and bring us closer to understanding what it means to be caught in—or to find pathways out of—the trap.

Small business owners play a central role in all advanced economies. Nonetheless, they are an understudied occupational group politically, particularly compared to groups that represent smaller portions of the population (e.g., union members, manufacturing workers). We conduct a detailed investigation of the politics of small business owners and offer new insight into the evolving role of education, class, and occupation in electoral politics. Leveraging diverse sources of data – representative surveys from around the world, campaign finance records, voter files, and a first-of-its-kind, bespoke survey of small business owners – we find consistent evidence that small business owners are more likely to identify with and vote for right-wing parties. We find that this tendency cannot be fully explained by factors that cause people to select into being small business owners. Rather, we identify a key operational channel: the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.

This study investigates the impact of inflation on the 2022 US mid-term elections, a period witnessing the resurgence of inflation as a major concern in the USA for the first time in decades. We develop a pre-registered survey with an embedded experiment to examine the political repercussions of rising prices. We find that individuals experiencing a higher personal inflation burden are more inclined to support Republican candidates. Our survey experiment further assesses the impact of partisan messaging leading up to the election, focusing on two primary narratives: government spending, as emphasized by Republicans, and corporate greed, highlighted by Democrats. The results indicate that attributing inflation to government spending decreases support for Democrats, whereas associating it with corporate greed undermines confidence in the Republicans’ ability to effectively manage inflation. Economic voting behaviour depends not only on objective economic conditions but also on how political parties subjectively frame these conditions.

The developmental states of Asia—South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—have been widely recognized for their successful COVID-19 governance. However, despite these successes, a closer examination reveals significant differences in their strategic responses and the medical resources mobilized. This article explains the different governance approaches taken by the three developmental states. We argue that the pre-crisis industrial coordination capacity of each developmental state plays a crucial role in determining both whether and which medical resources can be mobilized during emergencies. Through comparative case studies and within-case process tracing, we demonstrate how pre-established industry-level coordination capacities enabled Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore to strategically prioritize the production and mobilization of test kits, masks, and vaccines, respectively, especially in the initial phase of the pandemic. This article emphasizes that a country’s domestic production capacity, an often-overlooked institutional factor, can facilitate a more efficient response in a short period of time and significantly strengthen crisis management efforts.

While recent research on the origins of proportional representation (PR) in Europe has focused on domestic political explanations, we bring international trade back as an economic explanation for the politics of electoral system choice. Spurred by Rogowski’s (1987) theory of the trade origins of PR and the political economy literature on trade policy, we argue that political conflict over trade shaped the struggle over electoral reform during the first globalization. Because tariffs were a central and contested issue, economic interests hurt by rising tariffs under the old electoral system had economic motives to support the introduction of PR. To test this theory, we leverage district-level popular votes in Switzerland using a within-country research design. We find support for the core mechanism of the trade theory: demand for protectionism entailed stronger opposition to the introduction of PR. Using panel data, we demonstrate that changes in the relative size of the agricultural sector, the central pillar of support for protectionism, were closely related to changes in support for PR. We also examine legislative voting in Germany and find that protectionism was linked to subsequent opposition to electoral reform. Altogether, our analysis highlights the neglected importance of trade in conflict over electoral institutions.

Using Alabama as a case study of the beauty industry, this paper will demonstrate how licensing laws and regulations affected barbers and beauticians as they struggled to gain more clientele than their competitors. In the early twentieth century, white men dominated the market for cutting hair. Though the process started mid-century, by 1980, that relationship was inverted as women found themselves far outnumbering men. This research helps explain the gendered inversion of labor market trends while providing more general insights into the role of licensing laws in labor markets. Importantly, this work explores how race shaped labor market regulations, which affected and continue to affect labor markets and individual businesses in important ways.

The goal of this paper is to explain the multivariate causes of this important labor market reversal using an analysis of race, gender, and political economy. It will argue that the advocacy for restrictive licensing laws and regulations, the failure to innovate and adapt to new styles in hair, and the racial and gendered makeup of the Barbers, Beauticians, and Allied Industries (BBAI) led to the ultimate failure of the union and the overall decrease in barbers during the latter half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the degree to which black women were represented on licensing boards and played a role in the unique structure of cosmetology groups and unions led and contributed to the proliferation of cosmetologists during the same period.

US politics is living a tense period of transformation. Approaching the presidential elections of 2024, many commentators question the fate of the US representative democracy and its political system. Political scientists have largely contributed to the critical analysis of the US case. A special mention goes to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. The two scholars have marked the last two decades of US political science with a brilliant reconstruction of the American crisis and some of its key trends: the progressive increase of inequality; the mounting role of business lobbies; the decline of the US political economy and the erosion of the federal institutions. The present research note reviews three key books that shed light on contemporary US political economy through a typical political science approach. The value of these books goes well beyond the originality of the analysis of US politics. The books remind us the importance of three theoretical domains that marked political science and that merit to be further developed: interest group theory, neo-institutionalism and historical theories of democratization. Then, they shed light on the current dramatic tensions over representative democracies, well beyond the US exceptionalism. Hacker and Pierson provide an illuminating analysis of democratic tensions and give insights for the future research agenda of scholars of western political economies (including Italy and Europe). The books eventually outline some interesting methodological lines of future research.

This article investigates the scientization process in central banks, using the Bank of England (BoE) as a case study. Its main goal is to clarify the interactions and tensions among three dimensions of scientization: contributory, policymaking and legitimizing. To do so, we outline an ideal type of contributory scientization in central banks, whereby they become active contributors to science. The article derives empirically observable characteristics for this ideal type, regarding leadership and staff profiles, use of internal resources, composition of external networks, and publication and discursive outputs. The BoE is then contrasted to this ideal type of a central bank thoroughly involved in contributory scientization. The empirical material includes archives and interviews as well as three databases providing quantitative information from the 1970s to 2019. We find that the development of contributory scientization is strategically motivated, often generating tensions with policymaking and legitimizing dimensions. Our findings suggest that scientization in central banks is best understood as a three-dimensional, non-linear process, rather than a steamroller.

Empires and nation states tend to be understood as two distinct types of political organization. The former are primarily associated with the premodern world, while the latter have come to be seen as political forms paradigmatic of the modern. While colonialism is a process associated with empires, it is more usually practised by modern nation states in their establishment of overseas empires. These empires are marked by a particular form of political economy—a colonial political economy—which determines the specificity of their political form as distinct from earlier empires. In this article, I examine the Mughal Empire of the premodern period in relation to the subsequent establishment of British colonial rule in India, and discuss the particularities of each in terms of the modes of political economy—moral and colonial—which were characteristic of their administration. In particular, I address the mobilization of the precepts of classical liberalism by the British, as demonstrated in the response of colonial administrators to incidences of dearth and famine, and contrast this with the modes of governance of the preceding Mughal Empire. The differences between them, I suggest, demonstrate that British colonial rule was a structurally distinct, modern type of empire.

Welfare state research is at a theoretical impasse insofar as it does not systematically speak to the types of social policy effort that may have not only redistributive but also productive consequences. Cautioning against imprudent use of the social investment label this paper argues for a better understanding of how traditional social policies have enabled society’s adaptation to socioeconomic changes and prevented costly experiences of poverty. Synthesizing ideas drawn from development studies in the Global South and welfare state studies in the Global North, and elaborating on the inclusive strand of welfare developmentalism, the paper conceptualizes what allows existing social policies to be simultaneously protective and productive. It reviews current welfare state research and argues that developmentalist ideas help re-centre the (re)productive role of social policy. It proposes principles for thinking coherently about what makes existing welfare state policies developmental, challenging their characterization as exclusively passive or activating. Recognizing the productive impact of existing social policies requires that we explicitly rethink how welfare state policy effort is understood.