## Political Economy Overlay

### Activation
Apply this overlay when `study-designer` is used for political economy research on institutions, voting, policy, elites, state capacity, regulation, distributional conflict, or economic outcomes.

### Required Context
- Require the actor set, institution, incentive, distributional conflict, policy or economic outcome, comparison case or unit, method, and target venue family.
- Require whether the design tests a political mechanism, estimates a causal effect, builds theory, compares institutions, or maps a policy process.
- Require the evidence source for each mechanism step before selecting methods.

### Subject-Specific Procedure
1. Build an actor-institution-outcome map before choosing data or estimator.
2. State how incentives move actors through institutions toward the policy or economic outcome.
3. Identify winners, losers, distributional stakes, and boundary conditions.
4. Match design leverage to the claim: institutional assignment, timing, comparison, case selection, archival evidence, interviews, or quantitative variation.
5. Specify rival political and economic mechanisms and the evidence needed to separate them.

### Reviewer-Risk Checks
- Check whether the proposed evidence observes the mechanism or only the outcome.
- Check whether case selection, institutional timing, or actor incentives create selection bias.
- Check whether economic outcomes are overinterpreted without political process evidence.

### Output Requirements
- The study design artifact must include `Actors`, `Institution`, `Incentives`, `Distributional Conflict`, `Outcome`, `Mechanism Evidence`, and `Rival Mechanisms`.
- The design must state claim strength and the evidence needed to move from suggestive to causal or mechanism-supported.
- Missing actor, institution, or mechanism evidence must be recorded as a blocked check.

### Blocked Conditions
- Block mechanism claims when actors, incentives, or institutional action are unspecified.
- Block causal claims when timing, assignment, or comparison logic is absent.
- Do not let institutional context substitute for evidence of the political mechanism.
