Under the Radar: Women in (Comparative) Political Economy
MPIfG Lecture
- Date: Sep 11, 2023
- Time: 04:30 PM (Local Time Germany)
- Speaker: Dorothee Bohle
- Universität Wien
- Sign up: info@mpifg.de

The talk takes builds on the opportunity offered by of the first Max Planck Summer School for Women in Political Economy to reflect on the place of women in the field of CPE. It will first touch upon publication patterns, disciplinary boundaries, and narratives of the field to show how despite important recent innovations, comparative political economy has remained a “male island”. The second part of the talk offers normative and substantive arguments for opening up the field to female scholarship and issues of gender. Finally, I will outline some areas of fruitful engagement with feminist political economy to enlarge the CPE research agenda. The overall aim of the talk is not only to highlight how a neglect of gender (and other blind spots) hinders our capacity to understand contemporary capitalism and ongoing political struggles, but also to engage in some “disciplinary housekeeping” by reflecting on our academic and institutional biases and practices. As such, the talk is part of a broader initiative of making women and their work visible in political economy.
Dorothee Bohle is a professor of comparative politics at the University of Vienna. Previously, she was a professor of Political Science at the European University Institute, Florence and Central European University, Budapest. Her research is at the intersection of comparative politics and political economy with a special focus on East Central Europe. She is the author of Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery (Cornell University Press 2012, together with Béla Greskovits), which won the Stein Rokkan Prize in Comparative Research, and of Europe’s New Periphery: Poland’s Transformation and Transnational Integration (Münster 2002). Her publications have also appeared in in Comparative Politics, Studies in Comparative International Development, East European Politics, West European Politics, Journal of Democracy, European Journal of Sociology, and Review of International Political Economy, among others. Most recently, she has co-launched the initiative “Under the Radar: female scholarship in political economy” to make women in the field more visible.
Recommended preparatory reading
Bartosch, Julia, Nora Lohmeyer, Carolin Auschra, and Gregory Jackson. 2023. “Gendered Publication Patterns in Socio-Economic Review.” Socio-Economic Review 21 (3): 1273–89.
Best, Jacqueline, Colin Hay, Genevieve LeBaron, and Daniel Mügge. 2021. “Seeing and Not-Seeing like a Political Economist: The Historicity of Contemporary Political Economy and Its Blind Spots.” New Political Economy 26 (2): 217–28.