About

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) assembles and codes information on the policy processes of governments from around the world:

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 20 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.

Our innovative Trends Tool makes it easy for researchers to explore all of the available data series, country-by-country or for multiple countries at once. The Datasets/Codebooks page allows students of the policy process to download any datasets to examine in greater depth, or to integrate them with data series from other sources. Individual country pages offer detailed descriptions of each country project’s research program, information and datasets particular to that country, the research teams, and specific information on the data series monitored.