The Comparative Agendas Project

Description: 

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) assembles and codes information on the policy processes of governments from around the world.

CAP enables scholars, students, policy-makers and the media to investigate trends in policy-making across time and between countries. It classifies policy activities into a single, universal and consistent coding scheme. CAP monitors policy processes by tracking the actions that governments take in response to the challenges they face. These activities can take many different forms, including debating a problem, delivering speeches, (e.g. the Queen’s speech in the United Kingdom), holding hearings, introducing or enacting laws (e.g. Bills and Public Laws in the United States) or issuing judicial rulings (e.g. rulings from the European Court of Justice).

Using proven measures of policy-making activity occurrences allows researchers to assess trends in policy-making activities across time and among nations. CAP’s consistent system uses 21 major topics and 200+ subtopics to code those activities. CAP actively monitors thirty different data series, all coded by this same predictable, reliable coding system.

Links: 
Comparative Agendas Project
Directors MZES: 
Shaun Bevan
Involvement MZES: 
The data was harmonized with the contribution of an MZES researcher. Furthermore Shaun Bevan was direclty involved in the production of two data sets:The UK Policy Agendas Project and The Encyclopedia of Associations Project.
Data publication date: 
2013
Data citation: 
UK Policy Agendas (UK PA): John, P., Bertelli, A., Jennings, W., & Bevan, S. (2013). Policy agendas in British politics. Palgrave Macmillan.
The Encyclopedia of Associations (EA): Bevan, S., Baumgartner, F. R., Johnson, E. W., & McCarthy, J. D. (2013). Understanding selection bias, time-lags and measurement bias in secondary data sources: Putting the Encyclopedia of Associations database in broader context. Social science research, 42(6), 1750-1764.
For further citations of individual data sets see: http://www.comparativeagendas.net/pages/How-to-cite
Number citations cumulative: 
30 googles scholar ciations for the UK PA and EA
Number citations in year: 
20 googles scholar ciations for the UK PA and EA