World political science regards world politics as an integrated whole, aiming to study the evolution of the nature and basic order of world politics. Its research approach is to examine the common factors and forces that shape the world political landscape and world order, as well as trigger their major changes. World political theories attempt to explain the main factors and mechanisms of order transformation from three dimensions: fundamental driving forces, direct driving forces, and operational mechanisms.
The fundamental driving forces of world politics include technological revolutions, struggles for recognition, capital and the world market, etc. These fundamental driving forces give rise to the direct driving forces of world politics—the ebb and flow of world political thoughts and the changes in the landscape of world political forces. The world political landscape shapes the world political order through such operational mechanisms as power coercion, learning and internalization, and political compromise. Eventually, through domestic and international political struggles, diverse concrete forms of basic international order and national institutions come into being.
To promote the research and academic exchanges of world political science, World Politics Research Center of Chenghai Institute of Global Development and Security has launched a series of publications titled World Politics Briefing. The Briefing is intended to present readers with academic masterpieces closely related to the research agenda of world political science, including monographs and papers published by scholars both at home and abroad in recent years. It is issued on a monthly basis, with each issue introducing the main contents of three academic achievements. The Briefing is for academic research purposes only, and the contents of the compiled works do not represent the views of this Center.
The theme of this Issue 7 is "The Politics of Monopoly and the Market, and the Exclusivity of Liberalism". Three papers are selected for studies:
"Monopoly Politics: Price Competition, Learning, and the Evolution of Policy Regimes" by Erik Peinert examines a recurring policy phenomenon in advanced capitalist countries over the long course of history: the periodic shift of governments between the two economic policy orientations of "promoting price competition" and "safeguarding firms' market power". The core argument is that both policy regimes oriented toward price competition and those oriented toward safeguarding firms' market power will endogenously generate diminishing returns as they are continuously implemented.
"Market Competition and Political Influence: An Integrated Approach" by Steven Callander, Dana Foarta and Takuo Sugaya argues that market and politics constitute a co-evolutionary system. Firms pursue market power, while policymakers engage in rent-seeking; their interaction may lead to a decline in market efficiency, and traditional intuitive understandings of competition and innovation can be subverted under political intervention. Driven by self-interest and empowered with intervention capacity, policymakers may introduce new distortionary mechanisms into the market, even offsetting the positive effects brought by competition.
"The Exclusionary Foundations of Embedded Liberalism" by Sara Wallace Goodman and Thomas B. Pepinsky analyzes the domestic exclusivist foundations of embedded liberalism in the post-WWII era. Migration presents a fundamental contradiction to the post-war liberal international order. The post-war economic development of many advanced industrialized countries was driven by migration, yet the compensatory policies of embedded liberalism did not include migrants. Economic openness and political closure have created a "liberal paradox". The authors place migration at the core of the international liberal order: labor, like goods, services, and capital, flows across national borders and functions as another factor of production. By analyzing how states respond to migration, the author reveals the central dynamics behind the rise and decline of embedded liberalism.