Advancing the Study of Comparative Public Policy

The concluding chapter emphasizes several central points and contributions of the book. It first provides a summary of the extent of the emerging infrastructure that the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) has developed. It shows the many possibilities provided by this infrastructure, as illustrated by the comparative chapters in the volume. The chapter goes to discuss the achievements in terms of data collection and comparability. Finally, the chapter explores possible future directions of research for the CAP and, beyond, the field of comparative public policy. In particular, it could positively contribute to the study of the consequence of differences in bureaucratic structures. Similarly, the inclusion of media data has opened up new possibilities that have only just started to be explored. Finally, the study of “responsiveness” and its consequences for political behavior could also benefit from crossing, say, survey data with CAP data.

The Media Agenda

This chapter discusses what role the media agenda has played in (comparative) agenda research. Studies into the characteristics of the media agenda demonstrate that, compared to other agendas, the media agenda is characterized by high levels of responsiveness and volatility and that various outlets that jointly constitute the agenda strongly influence each other. In recent years, a vast amount of research has considered the impact of the media agenda on the parliamentary agenda (political agenda-setting) and how the size of this impact depends on a wide variety of contingent factors. Our empirical example uncovers considerable overlap in media agendas across various Western European countries, reflecting the importance of the international context in the construction of news.

Protest and Agenda-Setting

This chapter discusses the relevance of the protest agenda; it is an indicator of what active segments of the public care about. The literature about the agenda-impact of protest is briefly reviewed, there are few systematic and comparative studies. Almost all protests have as an aim to increase political attention to the underlying issue. But studies examining this agenda effect have come to mixed conclusions. The chapter then explores the CAP protest data from a comparative perspective. It looks into the overall similarity of the protest agenda in six countries, and it examines whether the same issues gain protest attention at the same time.

From Public to Publics

A rich body of work examines the public agenda in democratic countries. These studies rely on aggregate responses to survey questions that ask respondents to report their issue priorities—commonly using topline data of the most important problem survey series (MIP). This research design, however, is not sensitive to differences in issue priorities between individuals and groups and, therefore, fails to account for the possible variation within the general public. To overcome this neglect in existing literature, we examine individual-level responses to the most important problem question in two countries—the United States and Israel—focusing specifically on economic and foreign policy priorities. We reveal that beyond aggregate trends in the public agenda, socio-demographic factors in both countries explain some of the variation in issue dynamics.

The UK Policy Agendas Project

The UK Policy Agendas Project has collected a wide range of data on the policy agenda of major institutional venues in British politics and on the public and media agendas. This rich data source allows systematic and consistent analysis across institutions, and across countries, extending back over a century in the case of some agendas. The data provide measures of the policy agenda of the executive (the Speech from the Throne) and the legislature (Acts of UK Parliament), along with aggregate survey data about the public agenda (public opinion about the most important problem), media (front-page stories of The Times), Prime Minister’s Questions, and bills and hearings of the Scottish Parliament. Through its extensive collection of data, the project has enabled novel insights into the policy agenda of UK government, how it responds to shocks and external pressures, and how patterns of policy change and stability compare to other countries.

The Belgian Agendas Project

The Belgian Agendas Project started in 2001 and has been funded by four different research grants. Initially, the Belgian Project used a codebook other than the common CAP codebook widely used right now. The bulk of the data has been coded manually and now mostly covers the 1999–2010 period (with many datasets going back to earlier periods). A peculiarity of the Belgian data is the fact that it comes from two, largely separate political systems that ‘clash’ on the national level. Party and media systems, for example, are entirely separate. The Belgian media agenda is coded particularly extensively, as the Belgian team started from an interest in the media’s effect on politics. The Belgian team has also played a pioneering role in the party manifesto coding and the protest coding.

Gone Fishing

Every data-gathering effort is a story, often a horror story from the perspective of those that created it. This chapter presents a historical tale of the creation and logic behind the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) Master Codebook. The CAP is in reality a network of many projects aimed at classifying political agendas according to the policies they address. However, with no central administration or common source of funding the original coding framework experienced noticeable drift based on the context of each project. To harmonize the data across projects resulted in the creation of a common Master Codebook that was only possible with the support of the CAP community. This chapter further discusses the limitations of the CAP data. Ultimately the master coded CAP data presents a common way of understanding policy attention and provides the framework for more detailed work in and outside the CAP community.

Using CAP Data for Qualitative Policy Research

The Comparative Agendas Project is among other things a retrieval system and as such can be leveraged for qualitative case-oriented research. This chapter aims to demonstrate CAP’s usefulness for such qualitative analysis, starting from case selection, going through familiarization with the case of interest and ending with a collection of the needed evidence. After explaining each phase in case-oriented research and the role CAP can play, each use is demonstrated using CAP data from Spain and the United States. The case selection procedure is demonstrated using the concept of policy drift, and the familiarization and evidence collection through childcare policy.

The Turkish Policy Agendas Project

How do politicians respond to the policy priorities of the public in developing democracies? Do policymakers take into account their electoral mandate during their tenure in parliament? How does the relationship between media and politics work in a country that has a history of authoritarianism? The Turkish Policy Agendas Project aims to answer questions similar to these by providing systematic institutional data. The project content codes various parliamentary activities such as parliamentary debates, oral and written questions, parliamentary bills and laws. It also includes budget data dating back to the founding of the Turkish Republic. This chapter explains the construction of the dataset from data collection to coding, describes its features, and provides examples of possible applications.

The New Zealand Policy Agendas Project

Rhonda L. Evans launched the New Zealand Policy Agendas Project (NZPAP) in 2013 with support from the Edward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies that she directs at the University of Texas at Austin. The NZPAP now has a complete dataset of decisions for the New Zealand Supreme Court (2004–15) and Questions for Oral Answer for the 49th Parliament (2008–11). The project has produced one publication (Evans and Fern, 2015) and a series of conference papers. This chapter outlines some features of New Zealand’s political system; what was coded as part of NZPAP; and an example of how the data have been used.