Civil society comes of age in economics: Tracking a century of research

• Using topic modeling we characterize the main economic research themes since 1900. • A cluster of topics concerning civil society is distinct from markets and states. • We document a marked shift from state topics toward market topics prior to 1970. • Since then, civil society topics are more common and market topics less. • Advances in mathematical and empirical tools and data contributed to these changes. Using topic modeling on the corpus of papers published in seven leading economics journals since 1900, we study the evolving emphasis in research on themes relating to the state, markets, and civil society, the latter referring to families, firms as organizations, other private organizations, neighborhoods, and identity groups. We document a shift between 1900 and 1970 away from research on state-related topics towards the market, even as the economic importance of the state was growing. This was followed by a substantial movement away from market topics towards topics related to civil society. We associate the first shift with the mathematical formalization of the Marshallian paradigm. The subsequent increased attention to civil society coincided with novel research questions and empirical methods including experiments and the use of large datasets. Since the middle of the last century advances in game theory and the economics of asymmetric information also facilitated the extension of economists’ research agendas to encompass themes central to economic behavior in civil society, including other-regarding preferences and social norms as well as strategic interactions not covered by complete contracts.