Compare methods

	Comparative Political Economy	Welfare Regime Analysis
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	1990
Originator	Comparative politics & political economy tradition (Shonfield, Katzenstein, Hall, Soskice)	Gosta Esping-Andersen
Type	Macro-comparative research framework	Comparative typological framework
Seminal source	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752	Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691028576
Aliases	CPE, Comparative Capitalisms Approach, Macro-Comparative Political Economy, Institutional Political Economy	Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Welfare State Regime Typology, Esping-Andersen Welfare Typology, Decommodification Analysis
Related	3	3
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.	Welfare regime analysis classifies welfare states not by how much they spend but by the qualitative logic of how they distribute welfare, following Gosta Esping-Andersen's 1990 The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Its two organizing concepts are decommodification — the degree to which people can sustain a livelihood independent of the market — and stratification — the patterns of social inequality that welfare arrangements reproduce or alter. On these dimensions Esping-Andersen identified three clustered regime types: the liberal, the conservative-corporatist, and the social-democratic. His 1999 sequel extended the framework to the family and the postindustrial service economy, and a large critical literature has since debated additional types.