Not everyone agrees with me on this, but I don't care: literature reviews can be kind of silly artifacts that we hang on to in many disciplines. I generally think they can be wastes of space, when a few will placed and described citations with relevant discussion will usually do. When I'm refereeing for top journals, I don't really care who you cite, I'm reading for the methods, coherence of the paper, discussion, and other things.
To be clear, I'm not saying you should never cite work related to your own. It's just not usually necessary to dedicate an entire section of your paper to do this. Where am I going with this?
Make your lit review short. You and another thesis did very similar work? Okay great! Cite their thesis if you'd wish, and discuss the relevant work from the citations you (likely) were going to use anyways. And then?
Move on to better things. The more important things. My thesis had a very very very short lit review, also for political science incidentally. Why was it short? I had other and more important things to discuss than what previous papers hypothesized, and anything beyond what I put would simply have been a waste of space.
My advice to you, is to hit the high points. Talk about only the literature that is quintessential to your question, methods, or subject. That way, you'll be more concise, you won't simply repeat another person who summarized the information well, and then you can get to what you should be doing anyways: talk about why your paper is unique, interesting, or of relevant to the broader field. That's what you should be focusing on, why your own original work matters. Other work may be necessary to this, but it won't be enough to convince them why your work pushes the proverbial envelope.