We examine the impact of institutional and partisan characteristics of governments as well as political-economic forces essentially exogenous to the control of those governments on agenda volatility
Do institutions promote stability or change or both in policy agendas across time? Surprisingly, no clear answer to these questions follows from extant studies. We employ a Bayesian change point model to develop a measure of intertemporal volatility in policy agendas in several important substantive policy
domains using a data set of policy attention by governments in Denmark, Switzerland, France, Germany and the United Kingdom. We use this measure in time-series regression models to examine the impact of institutional and partisan characteristics of governments as well as political-economic forces essentially exogenous to the control of those governments on agenda volatility.
