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This paper is a keynote address prepared for a conference on “Entangled Political Economy” sponsored by the Wirth Institute. In keeping with the conventions of such an address, I look both backward and forward, while placing more emphasis on looking forward. In looking backward, I compare and contrast two orientations toward political economy: additive and entangled. In looking forward, I explore some of the analytical challenges that confront efforts to pursue a vision of entangled political economy. While these challenges are substantive in character, those efforts necessarily rest on methodological presumptions. Accordingly, the paper opens by reviewing some of those methodological presumptions before turning to the substantive articulations and challenges.

Prior research on political strategies has predominantly analyzed singular political activities or drivers for firms to become politically active and, overall, only scarcely obtained insights on performance consequences of political strategizing. To further develop the realm of political strategy, this study analyzes the effects of two “generic” political strategies on firms’ (1) stakeholder network development and (2) performance. Specifically, we provide theoretical and empirical evidence whether the two political strategies add to or substitute each other in their effect on the corresponding outcome variable. We find that an information strategy significantly affects the stakeholder network development, whereas no influence of a financial incentive strategy could be detected. Moreover, we find that the stakeholder network drives firm performance and, more importantly, that the two political strategies substitute each other in their effect on firm performance. Thus, we provide initial insights on the efficiency of political strategies when firms opt to execute an information strategy and financial incentive strategy simultaneously. The results of our study have important implications for research as they put a new light on the efficiency of political strategies.

Traditional public choice analysis implicitly views political outcomes as the intention of a single-minded person. This view is seriously misguided. Rather than viewing politics as being done by one person or a group of persons acting in concert, this chapter presents an Austrian economist’s thoughts on what an Austrian theory of public choice would look like. Particular attention is paid to the emergent, rather than additive, quality that political outcomes exhibit.

The difficulties that MR poses for comparativists were anticipated 40 years ago in Sidney Verba's essay “Some Dilemmas of Comparative Research”, in which he called for a “disciplined configurative approach…based on general rules, but on complicated combinations of them” (Verba, 1967, p. 115). Charles Ragin's (1987) book The Comparative Method eloquently spelled out the mismatch between MR and causal explanation in comparative research. At the most basic level, like most other methods of multivariate statistical analysis MR works by rendering the cases invisible, treating them simply as the source of a set of empirical observations on dependent and independent variables. However, even when scholars embrace the analytical purpose of generalizing about relationships between variables, as opposed to dwelling on specific differences between entities with proper names, the cases of interest in comparative political economy are limited in number and occupy a bounded universe.² They are thus both knowable and manageable. Consequently, retaining named cases in the analysis is an efficient way of conveying information and letting readers evaluate it.³ Moreover, in practice most producers and consumers of comparative political economy are intrinsically interested in specific cases. Why not cater to this interest by keeping our cases visible?

For comments on a previous draft, I wish to thank Mary O’Sullivan, Michael Shalev and Bruce Western.

Additive manufacturing (AM) has the potential to transform the organisation of all the activities carried out by firms. The growing diffusion of these technologies is increasingly challenging multinational enterprises to reinvent their businesses. Accordingly, many scholars argue that AM may reduce countries’ participation in global value chains (GVCs) or, at least, affect GVCs’ geography, length and further developments. However, so far, the lack of available data on the real worldwide diffusion of these technologies has precluded the possibility to study this phenomenon from an empirical standpoint.

This study investigates AM technologies, with a particular focus on their possible impact on GVCs, in the framework of the current debate in international business. In order to examine this relationship and overcome the lack of adoption data, the authors identify a potential proxy of AM diffusion – that is, patenting activity. Coherently, the authors employ this proxy and a country-level measure of GVC participation (i.e., the Share of Re-Exported Inputs on Total Imported Inputs) to empirically investigate the role of AM in influencing countries’ participation to GVCs. This country-level analysis is focussed on three specific industries and the aggregate economy in 58 countries for the period 2000–2014.

The results show that AM decreases a country’s participation in GVCs, both at the country level and, in particular, in the sectors which are more likely to be affected by AM technologies. This evidence suggests that this phenomenon might be induced by a decreasing reliance on intermediates processed abroad, hence an increasing importance of domestic goods, manufactured via AM.

Perhaps one of the most important points Shalev makes is that Przeworski and Tuene's (1970) admonition to comparative political analysts to replace the proper names of cases with concepts and variables, or to pursue what Ragin (1987) dubs variable-oriented research, has gone too far. In Shalev's view, cases (typically nation states for the purposes of this discussion) have become all but invisible. This is particularly troublesome in Shalev's mind because, at least as far as comparative analysis of developed democratic capitalist systems is concerned (and we can say the same for political research on Latin America, Africa, or Asia), the cases are few enough to know quite well and bring to the forefront of sophisticated analysis.¹ In addition, Shalev makes the distinct point that the theories we seek to test in comparative political research entail complex and often non-linear causal sequences: causes of particular political outcomes are commonly contingent on the presence of other forces, or conjunctural with temporally and spatially bound forces and contexts. In fact, in comparative theory, it is fair to argue (as Shalev does) that causal explanations of important political outcomes are often put forward in terms of complex configurations of multiple factors. Moreover, in theory and in practice, we are often confronted with the prospect of multiple configurative paths of causation of the same outcome. In the end, Shalev believes that the linear and additive logic of general MR analysis, as well as the more sophisticated versions with non-linear specifications and interaction terms, cannot adequately test our complex theories.