How new is the 'new' political economy in relation to political sociology? Economic and sociological approaches to politics contrasted

The main purpose of this article is to place the disciplinary relationships between political sociology and political economy in a proper framework. Such an endeavor is prompted by some recent conflations between these two disciplines. The main of these conflations is the attempt to transform political sociology into the new political economy in the sense of the economic or rational choice approach to politics. In consequence, sociologists seem to be in a danger of losing political sociology to economists embarking on such attempts. The article reconsiders these attempts, by identifying and examining the theoretical-methodological differences between political sociology and the new political economy. These differences are illustrated by a comparative application of their approaches to specific political processes, such as U.S. presidential elections. Since there exists a certain gap in recognizing and investigating such differences in the current literature, the key contribution of this article is to help fill in this void.