Is There a Different Political Economy for Developing Countries? Issues, Perspectives, and Methodology

It is argued that the same basic building blocks of political economy models are relevant for developing and developed economies, though the policy questions, key political mechanisms and specific models may differ. Towards this end, this paper first sets out a common framework of analysis and then argues that specific features of the political economy of developing economies can be analysed using this framework. This paper also reviews some empirical results on political budget cycles and on voter response to electoral manipulation that suggest that the same general behavioural rules may describe political actors in both developed and developing countries. Copyright The author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org, Oxford University Press.