Comparative Agendas

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The U.S. Policy Agendas Project collects and organizes data from various archived sources to trace changes in the national policy agenda and public policy outcomes of the United States since the Second World War.

Principal Investigator: Bryan Jones
Location: Department of Government, University of Texas at Austin
Email: policyagendas@gmail.com
Downloadable Data Series: 19
Time Span: 1901-2068
Total Observations: 894,574

US Policy Agendas

Featured Research:

State of the Union 2023

Using the Policy Agendas Project codebook, we can see how different presidents' State of the Union addresses differ in policy content. This year, we looked at both President Biden's 2023 State of the Union policy topics, and the average across all his State of the Union addresses. Download the PDF to look at the differences in more detail. Read more

The Importance of Attention Diversity and How to Measure It

Studies of political attention often focus on attention to a single issue, such as front-page coverage of the economy. However, examining attention to a single issue without accounting for the agenda as a whole can lead to faulty assumptions. One solution is to consider the diversity of attention; that is, how narrowly or widely attention is distributed across items (e.g., issues on an agenda or, at a lower level, frames in an issue debate). Attention diversity is an... Read more

Bryan Jones Responds to CAP Criticisms in Journal of Public Policy

In the March 2016 issue of the Journal of Public Policy, Dowding, Hindmoor, and Martin offered a critique of "Comparative Policy Agendas Projects as measurement systems." In this piece, entitled "The Comparative Policy Agendas Projects as measurement systems: response to Dowding, Hindmoor and Martin," Bryan D. Jones, the Director of the U.S. Policy Agendas Project and co-founder of the coding scheme offers a response to the criticisms of Dowding,... Read more

Baumgartner and Jones' newest book: The Politics of Information

How does the government decide what’s a problem and what isn’t? And what are the consequences of that process? Like individuals, Congress is subject to the “paradox of search.” If policy makers don’t look for problems, they won’t find those that need to be addressed. But if they carry out a thorough search, they will almost certainly find new problems—and with the definition of each new problem comes the possibility of creating a... Read more

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