Workshop: Comparative Policy Agendas Project

University Of Washington, Seattle WA

Investigators

Abstract

The Comparative Policy Agendas Project (CAP) is a 12 nation collaborative research endeavor involving approximately 40 political scientists and their graduate students (www.comparativeangendas.org). The core of the project is a comprehensive policy topic classification system developed with the support of the National Science Foundation. This classification system, originally developed to study issue agendas at the national level in the United States, is now being used (with minimal modifications) to compare issue attention across nations. The Comparative Policy Agendas Project workshop has two purposes. The first,which deals with intellectual merit, is to promote additional theorizing about the factors influencing issue agendas across the nations. While some work has made important advances in this area, most the studies using this data have been of a more exploratory nature. By allowing a wide variety of scholars to meet in a face-to-face setting, it is hoped that the interaction will lead to a more theoretically based form of inquiry. The second purpose, which concerns broader impacts, is connected to the funding for graduate students. Graduate students will be introduced to this data as well as computer techniques for classification methods and scraping technologies. It is hoped that these tools will allow the students to either use the data provided by the CAP in interesting and innovative ways or will provide the students with tools that facilitate their own research.