Regimes, institutions and foreign policy change

This dissertation examines the effects that different political regime types and institutional arrangements have on the amount of foreign policy change occurring a state. Scholars in International Relations studying the democratic peace have identified a relationship between characteristics of democracy and non-democracy and the behavior of states. Scholars in Comparative Politics have noted that certain institutions more easily facilitate policy change. This dissertation synthesizes these perspectives and develops and tests a number of hypotheses relating regime type, institutional arrangement, and party system to the amount of foreign policy change a state undertakes. Employing a pooled, cross-sectional time series design, the findings show that democracies are more stable in their foreign policies than are non-democracies, and that states with different political institutions and party systems differ with regard to the amount of foreign policy change they undertake.