Review of International Political Economy

Two decades after Hay’s classification of political economy research, not much has changed. Interests, institutions, and ideas continue to dominate, especially in international political economy (IPE) scholarship. Despite calls for more actor-centred and psychological approaches, the individual remains a missing ‘I’ in most IPE research. This paper advances the fourth ‘I’ in IPE by drawing on psychological work in foreign policy analysis (FPA) and demonstrating the utility of personality analysis in accounting for ways that political leaders manage integrated national economies. We use corporate taxation and tax competition as our illustrative case study, focusing in particular on the different ways leaders in Ecuador and Peru responded to windfall profits during the 2003–2013 commodities boom. We argue that interests, institutions, and ideas do not completely account for variation in the taxation of windfall profits in these countries and we employ leadership trait analyses of Presidents Correa and Humala to provide the missing link. Our results suggest personality differences, when combined with contextualised understandings of the pressures that leaders face, best explain their different approaches. Overall, the paper points to the profits of including personality in IPE and forges stronger links between IPE and FPA research.

Since the 1990s, a particular approach to analysing the political influence of economic ideas has emerged in International Political Economy (IPE)-often labelled 'the ideational turn'. This approach highlights the strong link between intellectual debates in the economics profession and developments in the realm of economic policy. This article reexamines this body of literature in the context of the crisis of neoliberalism and investigates how our theories of the power of economic ideas have been shaped by the neoliberal conjuncture under which they developed. The neoliberal era witnessed a broad depoliticisation of economic policy debates, a process in which economists played a crucial role. However, while major policy breaks in the twentieth century were tied to shifts in dominant economic theories, recent changes have occurred without corresponding transformations in economic thinking. Ideas once deemed heretical-such as tariffs, price controls, or industrial policy-have gained traction in policy circles, despite rejection from mainstream economics. This suggests that, unlike the neoliberal era, we are entering a period where economic policymak-ing is increasingly detached from academic economics. The article examines the consequences of these recent changes and discusses their impact on the study of economic ideas for IPE in a post-neoliberal world.