The Diffusion of Concepts from Economics to Political Science: Disciplinary Dependency Meets Disciplinary Imperialism

Abstract

There has been considerable discussion, dating back to at least the 1970s, and involving Coase and Hirshleifer among others, of the notion of "economic imperialism," the expansionist tendency of economics to move into topic areas previously considered outside the reach of economics. We trace the diffusion of concepts over time from the "imperialistic" discipline of economics into and through the "borrowing" discipline of political science. Focusing on a diverse set of 78 economics-based concepts, we profile statistically the extent, pace, and pattern of conceptual borrowing in the three leading "general readership" political science journals, 1911-2006.

Our analyses include the following features. First, whereas prior discussions often focused on economists moving into and working on "noneconomic" topics, we consider instead the migration of economic concepts to political science, and the extent to which the migration results in political scientists using these concepts. This allows us to evaluate a claim of Coase (1978) about the conditions under which concepts would migrate and be adopted by the practitioners of the receiving discipline. Second, we use a simple benefit-cost framework of the incentives facing a political scientist to adopt an economic concept in order to develop simple hypotheses about which concepts might migrate. Our data allow us to test these hypotheses. Third, we examine in detail the development within economics and the subsequent migration of the "median voter" concept, a case of particular interest. Instructive features include its complex genesis within economics, and its pattern of reception and acceptance-versus-resistance within political science. More generally, our findings enable us to speak to the role played by active agents or conceptual entrepreneurs in conceptual diffusion, the importance of intuitive accessibility to non-specialists and similarity to concepts already in use in the receiving discipline, the slow pace of the diffusion process into and within political science, and the superficial use in political science of most of the economics-based concepts that do take root. We conclude by considering the future of the economics-political science link.

Keywords: economic imperialism, concept migration to political science, median voter concept, economics-political science link