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Climate change, health pandemics, structural decline, and more – the challenges of solving political problems are daunting, particularly when the political institutions addressing them are not trusted. This article tests the economic theory that residents of high-income regions are more likely to trust political institutions, given their positive experiences with services and opportunities, against the rival argument that predicts a negative effect of regional disadvantage within a country on political trust. Using European Values Study and World Values Survey (2017–2020) data, combined with socioeconomic data for 606 regions in 42 countries, this paper analyses samples of regions both in and outside the EU. The results suggest that people living in wealthy EU regions – both in absolute and relative terms – trust national government more and the EU less. In the global sample, the evidence is more variegated and corroborates economic theory only in democracies. The article sketches implications for regional inequality, political trust, and legitimacy research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the presence and consideration of economics in sociology, specifically its classical version. It identifies certain original and independent economic theories, concepts and approaches in classical sociological theory as central and its derivations, implications and extensions of economics as peripheral. The paper argues and demonstrates that classical sociology is far from being the science of noneconomic or irrational phenomena, as often sociologists conceive it and economists perceive it in counter-distinction from economics defined as the science of rational behavior, and indeed encompasses virtually all economic activities and processes, and thus prefigures New Economic Sociology adopting the same approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nearly 250 years on, the publication of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is widely understood as a germinal moment for modern (political) economic analysis. Within political economy, the text continues to be cited not only as the inauguration of a specifically liberal theoretical tradition, but also as a foundational statement of what it means to be doing political economy more broadly. Yet established readings of the work have reproduced, perhaps unwittingly, assumptions about the nature and remit of its content drawn from subsequent economic thought, obscuring crucial environmental ideas that underpinned its main conclusions. Though long overlooked within orthodox readings, Smith in fact insisted that essential to political economic analysis was a careful consideration of the materiality of evolving relationships between societies and the nonhuman environment – an approach that, I suggest, can justifiably be viewed as a kind of 'social ecology'. Reassessing these theoretical foundations reveals, on the one hand, over-optimistic ecological assumptions that he bequeathed to subsequent liberal political economy. On the other, in light of today's ecological crisis, it prompts us to reconsider the importance, for political economic analysis more broadly, of a materialised understanding of the relationship between human societies and the earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]