Comparative Agendas Project

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.