Compare methods

	Fiscal Sociology Analysis	Comparative Political Economy
Field	Political Economy	Political Economy
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1918	2001
Originator	Joseph Schumpeter; Charles Tilly; Martin, Mehrotra & Prasad	Comparative politics & political economy tradition (Shonfield, Katzenstein, Hall, Soskice)
Type	Historical-comparative analytical framework	Macro-comparative research framework
Seminal source	Schumpeter, J. A. (1918/1991). The Crisis of the Tax State. In R. Swedberg (Ed.), The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism. Princeton University Press. ISBN: 9780691003832	Hall, P. A., & Soskice, D. (Eds.). (2001). Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 9780199247752
Aliases	Fiscal Sociology, New Fiscal Sociology, Sociology of Taxation	CPE, Comparative Capitalisms Approach, Macro-Comparative Political Economy, Institutional Political Economy
Related	3	3
Summary	Fiscal sociology analysis treats taxation not as a narrow technical matter but as a window onto state-society relations and the formation of the state itself. The tradition descends from Joseph Schumpeter's 1918 essay The Crisis of the Tax State, with its dictum that the fiscal history of a people is above all an essential part of its general history, and from the historical-sociological work of Charles Tilly (1990) linking war, capital, and the building of European states. The New Fiscal Sociology of Martin, Mehrotra, and Prasad (2009) revived and reframed the field, arguing that taxes are social contracts as much as revenue instruments: how a state taxes reveals who holds power, what bargains bind rulers and ruled, and what the polity is capable of. The method reads the tax system as a record of social structure, conflict, and the reciprocal making of states and citizens.	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.