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Issue-area and foreign policy revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2009

Matthew Evangelista
Affiliation:
For criticisms and suggestions, I am grateful to Stephen Krasner, to three anonymous reviewers, and to the participants in the session entitled State, Society, and Security Policy at the 1987 meeting of the American Political Science Association, where an early version of this article was presented.
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Extract

In the study of comparative foreign policy, two schools of thought disagree over what accounts for variations in processes and outcomes of foreign policies within and between states. One holds that differences in the characteristics of the countries in question lead to differences in their foreign policies. The other argues that the important differences are not between countries but between issue-areas. A comparison of the Soviet Union and the United States in the issue-area of military policy (in particular, the process of weapons innovation) suggests that the policy processes differ substantially, contrary to what an issue-area approach would predict. On the other hand, the distinctions made by some students of political economy who focus on domestic structures appear to account well for differences between the U.S. and Soviet processes of innovation. The domestic structural approach should be applied to the study of comparative military policy as well as foreign economic policy.

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Copyright
Copyright © The IO Foundation 1989

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