New Approaches to Political Economy. The political economy of institutional change

The discussion on ‘New Approaches to Political Economy (PE)' gives us a state-of-the-art overview of the main theoretical and conceptual developments within theconcept of political economy. Thereby, it invites us to broaden our knowledge re-garding manifold novel approaches, which make use of more complex methods tostudy the less stable, less predictable, but faster changing realities of smaller or big-ger geographical regions. In this discussion forum, Amable takes a closer look onthe nature of ‘conflict' as well as the relationship between conflict and institutionalchange or stability. After stressing the relevance of comparative capitalism in gen-eral, Regan also zooms in on the political conflicts in comparative political economyfrom three different perspectives (electoral politics, organized interest groups andbusiness-state elites), where he finds new avenues, tensions and research agendasare opening up. From a different perspective, Avdagic reviews the broad develop-ments in the field of political economy with respect to the supply and demand sideof redistributive policy. Thereafter, Baccaro and Pontusson sketch an alternative‘growth model perspective', which puts demand and distribution at the center of theanalysis. Finally, Van der Zwan analyses the usefulness of financialization studiesfor the study of (comparative) political economy