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Political economies evolve institutionally and technologically over time. This means that to understand evolutionary political economy one must understand the nature of the evolutionary process in its full complexity. From the time of Darwin and Spencer natural selection has been seen as the foundation of evolution. This view has remained even as views of how evolution operates more broadly have changed. An issue that some have viewed as an aspect of evolution that natural selection may not fully explain is that of emergence of higher order structures, with this aspect having been associated with the idea of emergence. In recent decades it has been argued that self-organization dynamics may explain such emergence, with this being argued to be constrained, if not overshadowed, by natural selection. Just as the balance between these aspects is debated within organic evolutionary theory, it also arises in the evolution of political economy, as between such examples of self-organizing emergence as the Mengerian analysis of the appearance of commodity money in primitive societies and the natural selection that operates in the competition between firms in markets.

Does the media through its news convey us their categorisation, have particular lexical choices, give less space or voice to the actors regarding the news that mentioned street vendors in Turkey? The research question of this study is that whether or not the print media covers street vendors in their news? What is the tone of these news articles? In which pages do they cover? What are the news themes related with street vendors and who are the main actors in this news? This chapter presents a systematic study of 100 news articles which were published between 2016 and 2018 in Turkey’s mainstream, popular newspaper Hürriyet. The 100 news which included the word ‘street vendor’ in the texts were selected from the Hürriyet’s database and categorised and the content of the news articles were analysed. Findings of the of 100 news articles which mentioned ‘street vendor’ were researched and analysed totally. The analysis already reveals that the word choice of the news articles regarding street vendors are often conflict stories between the vendors and municipality police forces namely ‘Zabıta’ in Turkey. In sum, there were 19 news articles that referred street vendors with positive tone and wording, but 68 news articles still depicted street vendors in negative framing and use negative attribution in the text of the news. Totally 16 news articles included by-line and the rest of the 84 news articles did not include the journalist’s name and were covered as anonym. Out of the 100 news articles only a handful focussed on the advocacy and rights of street vendors.

Social scientists have long been interested in how political institutions affect economic performance. Nowhere are these effects more apparent today than in the current U.S. financial meltdown. This article offers an analysis of the meltdown by showing how government regulation among other things helped cause it. Specifically, the article shows how regulatory reforms closely associated with neoliberalism created perverse incentives that contributed significantly to the increased lending in the mortgage market and increased speculation in other financial markets even as such behavior was becoming increasingly risky. The result was the failure of mortgage firms, banks, a major insurance company, and eventually the market for short-term business loans, which triggered a general liquidity crisis thereby thrusting the entire economy into a severe recession. Implications for future research are explored. The article also offers a few policy prescriptions and an assessment of their political viability going forward.