| As new institutionalisms in social science pay more attention on the influence of agents in institutional change research,it provides us some evidences on the influence of these actors.However,it’s important for us to make sure about their behaviors and impact mechanism on institutional change,so that we could understand institutional change better.This study is based on international security governance which should be the empirical field for this study.In this article,the author tries to answer two questions: what factors restrict policy subjects’ behavior when they use policy instruments to influence institutional change(alliance’s change);How they promote institutional change under these conditions.Based on James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen’s research framework,this article chooses policy environment as the first independent variable,this variable is measured by the structure of international system and alliance cohesion.The former is a decisive factor in policy process which restrain policy subjects,the latter define subject’s influence on target institution.On the basis of the aforementioned content,policy learning capability has been chosen as the second independent variable which content state’s decision system and elite’s cohesion as two measurement dimensions.And then,this article brings organizational learning theory as the main tools for establishing the policy learning and adaption mechanism to explain the change of policy.This article then uses Process Tracing,System Analysis and Comparative Analysis as analytic tools for case studies,which include Weimar Germany and anti-Germany alliance,the U.S and Anglo-Japanese alliance,the Soviet Union in Khrushchev and NATO,the Soviet Union in Gorbachev and NATO,France in Napoleon and anti-France alliance,Wilhelmine Germany and anti-Germany alliance.The results includes:(1)Policy environment usually shape the strategic spaces of policy subjects which could be restrained by policy learning capability.(2)Policy learning capability influence the effect of the process of adaption.(3)Policy subjects adjust their policy through policy learning and adaption process which induce the institutional change.This study also provide some theoretical enlightenment as follows:(1)It refines the gradual institutional change model with external agency.(2)Besides,this article verifies the restricts under which policy subjects influence institutional change duringtime.(3)According to the results of empirical research,this study also supplements the mechanism of the influence of policy learning on institutional change. |
