Abstract
Abstract The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) collects, organizes, and makes freely available millions of bits of information concerning the objects of government attention over long periods of time (often back to the Second World War) for more than 25 political systems, worldwide. As researchers affiliated with the CAP expand their projects into Latin America, they confront some challenges similar to those from other regions, and some unique to their national political systems. In this introductory essay, we explore the background of the CAP and the opportunities posed by its expansion into Latin American political systems.
Highlights
ON THE COMPARATIVE AGENDAS PROJECTThe Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) developed organically from the US-based Policy Agendas Project
Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones noted in the research they conducted for their 1993 book, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993) that they could learn much by assessing small bits of information over long periods of time to trace the development of public policy toward a particular policy issue
Stefaan Walgrave at the University of Antwerp had independently developed a similar project in Belgium, and he soon realized the value of making his data consistent with others
Summary
The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) developed organically from the US-based Policy Agendas Project. Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones noted in the research they conducted for their 1993 book, Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993) that they could learn much by assessing small bits of information over long periods of time to trace the development of public policy toward a particular policy issue They studied a handful of issues, including nuclear power, pesticides, and tobacco, tracing media coverage and US congressional hearings on those topics, noting whether the attention was favorable to or critical of the industry in question. Without reviewing all the issues elucidated by CAP scholars using the related databases from the project, our point is simple: with a bigger telescope, we can discover more Many of these questions were recently explored in an edited book describing the data associated with the CAP and the projects associated with it (see Baumgartner, Breunig, & Grossman, 2019b)
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