José Tomás Labarca

My research and teaching interests sit at the intersection of historical-economic sociology, political economy, social and political theory, economic policy, state budgets, public bureaucracies, and the politics of lay and expert ideas.  

My first book, Fragmented Policy Change (Cambridge University Press), challenges the conventional narrative that the 1970s were a fundamental watershed between two seamless economic policy paradigms in Western democracies, Keynesianism and neoliberalism. Taking the United Kingdom from the 1960s to the 1980s as a case study, the book examines how the politics of official knowledge and conflicts between competing government elite coalitions drove processes of fragmented policy change before and after the 1970s.

I have also written on the politics of macroeconomic governance in the twenty-first century and on the fiscal politics of Latin America, among other topics. My work has appeared in journals such as Socio-Economic Review, New Political Economy, The Political Quarterly, Latin American Research Review, and Revista Mexicana de Sociología. My doctoral research won the 2023 Political Studies Association Walter Bagehot Prize for the best dissertation in the field of government and public administration.