Customer Reviews

The Oxford Handbook of Political Economy (Oxford Handbooks of Political Science)

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4 star:		(1)
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This handbook is almost excellent - it is certainly one of the two best handbooks in OUP's series, alongside Boix and Stokes' one on Comparative Politics. It is by far better than the other titles in the series, such as the one on political institutions, that on public management, or that on public policy. The reason for this success is threefold (i.e. the book scores very well on three criteria):

(1) It covers almost anything you would wish to read about in this sub-discipline, from public choice to principal-agent, and from monetary or trade politics to constitutional issues;
(2) It really reaches up to the state-of-the-art in every single chapter (except perhaps the strange chapter on Arrow, which nevertheless makes for an interesting read); and
(3) Most of it is written clearly, with individual chapters presenting the historical evolution of knowledge in their areas, and hence enhancing one's understanding of the significance (or lack of) of newer scholarship.

Having said that, OUP was not going to publish another volume on different ways of doing political economy. For this reason, this volume should have dedicated a little space to non-mathematical traditions, such as the one usually exhibited by contributors in the Review of International Political Economy. (One may or may not agree with these informal and indeed quite "ideologically-loaded" traditions. Nevertheless, they are part of our world, and as such, they should be duly acknowledged, described, and if applicable criticised.)

The second reason why I don't give this volume a 5-star is that there is nothing to set the non-specialised reader ready for some generally technical chapters. More often than not, the mathematics and the rationale of the formal models is not fully explained -- at least for someone who is not already familiar with this body of work. This could have been dealt with rather easily, for example by providing a separate chapter on the way optimization theory was introduced into the analysis of political phenomena, or more simply by offering an appendix that would take you in 20 pages from the theory of functions to partial derivatives and the basic rules of integral calculus (for something like that, see Morrow's "Game Theory" of 1994).

All in all, this is excellent for specialists or really interested readers, but neither encompassing nor simple enough to make sense to everybody else.