This Working Paper contains an empirical assessment of the relationship between political regime type and policy patterns in a range of developing countries for the period 1978 to 1988. The approach used was to develop a number of broad hypotheses about the likely policy preferences of different types of political regime and to explore these through measurable policy variables. To test these relationships empirically the policy variables were correlated with measures of political and civil rights using Spearman's Rank Correlation Coefficient, and for some policy variables a series of regression equations were estimated to allow for differences in economic structure.