CAP Statement on Facebook's Political Ads Transparency Program
26 May 2018
Comparative Agendas Project Statement on Facebook's Political Ads Transparency Program
Press Release
5/26/2018
AUSTIN, TX - The Comparative Agendas Project released a statement today regarding Facebook's
new political advertising transparency initiative. As part of the initiative, Facebook worked with a scholar at the University of California-Davis affiliated with the Comparative Agendas Project to identify and classify issue ads into twenty categories. The Comparative Agendas Project data has been used by hundreds of peer-reviewed academic works, as well as by think tanks and other research organizations and in government.
Bryan Jones, J.J. “Jake” Pickle Regent’s Chair in Congressional Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and Director of the U.S. Policy Agendas Project, said the following in a statement today,
"We are pleased that companies such as Facebook are adapting our classification system to help understand and track the policy content of political advertising. While the Comparative Agendas Project as an organization is not directly involved with this effort, we welcome any opportunity to work with Facebook or other advertising companies to better understand the content on their platforms. We also encourage scholars to work with these companies in their individual capacity on this important issue of pubic interest."
About the Comparative Agendas Project
The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) is a non-partisan, academic data collection initiative comprising dozens of social scientists in more than twenty countries. 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 activity allows researchers to assess trends in policy-making activities across time and among nations. CAP’s consistent system uses 20 major topics and 200+ subtopics to code those activities. CAP actively monitors more than thirty different data series, all coded by this same predictable, reliable coding system.
Media Contact
Professor Bryan D. Jones
Director
Professor Frank Baumgartner
Co-Director
Notes
1. The U.S. Policy Agendas Project data were originally collected by Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan D. Jones, with the support of National Science Foundation grant numbers SBR 9320922 and 0111611, and are currently distributed by the University of Texas at Austin.
2. The Comparative Agendas Project master topic codebook can be found
here. The United States-specific codebook can be found
here.
3. The U.S. Policy Agendas Project maintains over 21 datasets, which are all downloadable and available for public use with attribution. The datasets can be found
here.
4. Facebook's statement on the initiative can be found
here. Facebook's twenty issue categories, which were partially adapted from the Comparative Agendas Project policy topic codebook, can be found
here.
