Resources
The US Policy Agendas project
The seminal Agendas and Instability in American Politics (Baumgartner and Jones, 1993) criticised the gridlock thesis: the idea that political institutions stabilised policymaking in policy monopolies that remained intact as a result of the strong constitutional framework of checks and balances in the United States . Instead, long periods of inactivity in politics and decision-making are punctuated by brief periods of rapid policy change. This became known as the 'punctuated equilibrium model' (see Baumgartner and Jones, 1991; 1993; 2002a; 2002b; Jones, 1994; Jones and Baumgartner, 2005a; 2005b).
Following Agendas and Instability in American Politics , Baumgartner and Jones tested this model through coding the political agenda of decision-making in the United States, including Congressional budgets and hearings, Congressional Quarterly Almanac stories, Presidential executive orders, the New York Times, public opinion and Congressional bills and laws. And although the form and nature of public policies and their outputs are both highly complex and ever-changing, this coding was achieved with a high degree of reliability (see Baumgartner et al., 2006a; John, 2006a). The Policy Agendas Project, as this became known, compiled a definitive Topic Codebook for its policy content coding framework, which enabled the allocation of codes for the major aspects of public policy, such as macroeconomic issues, education and health, and distinct sub-topics within these categories, which now reach 225 in number.
The Comparative Agendas project
Comparative scholars have used the theories and methods of the original Policy Agendas project to measure and investigate the nature of policymaking in institutional and cultural contexts outside the United States (Baumgartner et al., 2006a; John, 2006a).
A number of projects have applied the content coding system of the Policy Agendas project (or adaptations of that framework) to different national systems. In most cases, researchers find that the content coding framework can be translated directly, although there are certain aspects of the institutional system in the United States that have no direct parallel. The constitutional prominence of the legislature in the United States means that certain procedures that are classed as legislative are part of executive policymaking elsewhere. Another important difference is variation in the set of state activities, where the far less comprehensive welfare state in the United States means that a few sub-topic codes require reclassification.
Despite minor cross-national variation, participants in the Comparative Agendas Project find that the content coding framework is both transferable and meaningful in the sense of providing reliable categorizations that enable direct comparisons.
