Comparing Policy Agendas in Europe and North America

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) is an international research collaboration initiative that nowadays encompasses over 80 researchers in 10 European countries, the USA and Canada, who study policy agendas of various political institutions, media and public opinion. A review of recent developments within the project has appeared in the online journal Perspectives on Europe of the Council for European Studies. The authors of the contribution, MI Research Director Arco Timmermans and MI PhD Researcher Petya Alexandrova, depict distinct features of the project, provide a recent example on the European Council agenda and outline the way ahead.

The CAP is based on the notions of information and attention. Due to limits in processing information, attention of both individuals and organisations is selective. When an issue is portrayed dramatically, it absorbs attention, thus leading to disproportionately little attention to other issues. The relative stability of the agenda is then interrupted by a major shift, called punctuation (punctuated equilibrium theory). This theoretical perspective has united scholars on both sides of the Atlantic, building up a big research community.

Main pillars of the international project are the measurement of common indicators for policy agendas and a joint data coding approach. Large datasets have been developed tracing issue attention in parliaments, governments, the media, public opinion, legislative output and budget decisions. A comprehensive coding scheme enables comparisons across countries and types of agendas. Recently, innovative analytical tools have also been released, making it possible to apply automatic text classification to some sorts of data. The CAP has been evolving with new findings feeding back to the general theory. For example, studies of different agendas have shown that punctuations in attention change are higher as the policy process moves from input to output in the political system. Changing the agenda points contained in media or parliamentary questions (input agendas) is easier and less costly than in legislation or budgets (output agendas).

The European Council – the highest political body of the European Union – is one of the newest venues analysed within the project. A study of European Council Conclusions shows that the most dominant topics on the agenda are macroeconomics, international affairs and EU governance issues but the institution actually addressed a broad variety of topics. Shifts in attention involve large cuts and even dropping topics out of the agenda, similarly to government agendas in nation states. On-going research discusses the role of the EU Presidency in European Council agenda setting.anchor("_GoBack")

The Montesquieu Institute is working on the Dutch and European side of the Comparative Agendas Project. For more information see The Politics of Attention. The Issue of Perspective on Europe is available upon subscription on: http://www.ces.columbia.edu/publications/perspectives-on-europe.