Policy Change in Democracies and Autocracies

The main function of political systems, irrespective of regime type, is to take authoritative decisions. Nonetheless, it is likely that the type of regime makes an important difference when it comes to which issues make it on the agenda, whose interests are represented in the policies that eventually get adopted, how the policy process looks like and what the outcomes of policy changes will be. In our paper, we discuss what differences to expect regarding agenda and policy change in different regime types. The paper will focus on the theoretical and conceptual level and will analyze what the most important policy process frameworks have to say about the differences between agenda and policy change in democratic and autocratic regimes. Accordingly, we will look at the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) and the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). All of these frameworks have been widely applied empirically in democracies but have also been amended conceptually and theoretically to be able to explain policymaking in autocracies. Hence, they should provide fertile intellectual ground for deducing hypotheses about policy change in different regime types. The paper would fit very well into the panels on "Policy Change Between Actors and Stages" or on "Policy Processes Beyond Democracies".