Punctuated equilibrium theory and foreign policy

Résumé 0

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), first proposed by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993), explains how the same institutional setup, usually preventing new policy issues from gaining political attention, is also responsible for the occasional outbursts of attention that cause disproportionately large policy shifts. PET has been successfully applied to a wide range of public policies and has increasingly generated cross-sectional and cross-national analyses, which aim at understanding and comparing the causes of stability and change in different political systems. However, the focus of these studies has mostly been on domestic policies, with only very little attention for PET in foreign policy analysis. The aim of this chapter is to show that PET is not only relevant in the realm of domestic politics, but also useful for studying and understanding foreign policymaking. Therefore, we explain PET, its main concepts and how it has evolved over the past two decades. We then apply and test PET in a foreign policy context by looking at yearly changes in attention to foreign policy issues and examining the relationship between changes in foreign aid allocations and the size of aid administrations. We come to the conclusion that PET constitutes a unique tool to examine why certain foreign policy issues move up and down the political agenda and how different political actors influence each other in this process.