February EPERN Seminar: Meg Tuszynski
Our next lecture will take place on March 2, at 2:30 p.m. EST. We'll hear from Meg Tuszynski - she will be presenting her recent paper entitled: Beyond Markets and Governments: Fitting the Third Sector into the Entangled Political Economy Framework.
Paper Abstract:
In this paper, I extend the framework of entangled political economy (EPE) to include third sector organizations. Within the literature on EPE, we talk almost exclusively about the admixture between the political and the economic, but it’s unclear where those organizations that are neither political nor economic fit into the framework. What is clear is that these organizations operate within the same social space in which political and economic activity are operating. Individuals within third sector organizations interact regularly with both market and political actors, so can reasonably be thought to be inhabiting an entangled world. Yet thus far, the EPE literature has little accounted for individuals in this alternative sphere. We generally tend to think that third sector organizations serve those whom they’re trying to help better than similar government organizations. But for some larger, more bureaucratic third sector organizations, this might not unequivocally be the case. More localized government organizations, who have stronger insights into the individuals and communities they’re trying to help, can in some cases achieve better results than larger, more bureaucratic third sector organizations trying to solve the same problems. If we’re serious about shedding the additive language and thinking of traditional political economy for the language and framework of entanglement, then we can’t automatically blame the relative size of government involvement in market or non-market processes for creating problems. Incorporating the third sector into the framework of EPE can help us to determine some of the institutional problems that make entanglement more or less problematic.
Meg is the Assistant Director of the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom, and is also a Research Assistant Professor with the Bridwell Institute. Her research focuses primarily on the determinants and correlates of economic freedom. A second, but related, strand of research focuses on potential for private, philanthropic organizations to provide viable alternatives to public poverty relief programs. Before joining the Bridwell Institute, Meg was the Program Manager for the Spending and Budget Initiative at the Mercatus Center. She earned her PhD and MA in economics, and a dual BA in philosophy and economics, from George Mason University. Her research interests include Austrian Economics, Public Choice, New Institutional Economics, and Political Economy.
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