Compare methods

	Comparative Political Economy	Power Resources Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	1983
Originator	Comparative politics & political economy tradition (Shonfield, Katzenstein, Hall, Soskice)	Walter Korpi & Gosta Esping-Andersen
Type	Macro-comparative research framework	Comparative political economy theory
Seminal source	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752	Korpi, W. (1983). The Democratic Class Struggle. Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN: 9780710094490
Aliases	CPE, Comparative Capitalisms Approach, Macro-Comparative Political Economy, Institutional Political Economy	Power Resources Theory, Power Resource Approach, Class Mobilization Theory, Korpi Power Resources Model
Related	3	4
Summary	Comparative political economy (CPE) is the subfield that asks how political institutions and markets interact to produce different economic outcomes across capitalist democracies, and the macro-comparative research strategy that subfield employs. Rather than treating the economy as a self-contained system, CPE treats production regimes, labor markets, finance, welfare states, and innovation as politically constructed and institutionally embedded, then compares how distinct national configurations — for instance the liberal market economies and coordinated market economies of Hall and Soskice's varieties-of-capitalism framework — generate systematically different patterns of wages, growth, inequality, and adjustment. The approach combines small-N case comparison and large-N cross-national analysis under a shared institutionalist logic.	Power resources analysis is a comparative political-economy framework, developed above all by Walter Korpi in The Democratic Class Struggle (1983) and extended by Gosta Esping-Andersen in The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990), that explains the size and shape of welfare states by the distribution of power resources between social classes. Its central claim is that under democratic capitalism the working class can offset capital's structural advantage in markets by mobilizing political power resources — above all the organizational strength of trade unions and the governing strength of left and labor parties. Where labor is strongly organized and durably in government, it builds class coalitions that translate that power into generous, redistributive social policy and a high degree of decommodification: the extent to which citizens can maintain a livelihood without depending on the market.