Although political risk in banking has received much more attention in recent years, there is no review that synthesizes these incoherent studies and provides a comprehensive image of the field in the past, present, and future. This paper is a meta-synthesis literature review on political risk in banks over a 35-year period from 1985 to 2019. We summarize the studies on political risk in banks in terms of the underlying theories to highlight the research streams, trends, and thematic structure of the field. By applying bibliometric and content analyses, we identified four main clusters in the literature: (1) political interference in bank lending and its consequences, (2) effects of government and regulatory interventions on bank risk-taking, (3) effects of the institutional and political environment on banking development and performance, and (4) economic models related to political risk in banks. Finally, this study poses 14 questions for future research.
