Legislative Productivity in Comparative Perspective: An Introduction to the Comparative Agendas Project

In this paper, we introduce an ambitious comparative politics research program. The Comparative Agendas Project has two main purposes. The first is to bring together scholars from many nations who share an interest in developing systematic indicators of issue attention and policy outputs within their nations??? political systems. The second is to advance collaborative, comparative policy research by applying ??? to the extent feasible ??? the same set of attention and output indicators to every political system. Constructing a policy topic system that effectively captures changing issue attention within a country over many years is challenging enough. The Comparative Agendas Project seeks to develop a single topic system that effectively captures the range of issues addressed across most advanced industrialized democracies. For the first time, scholars will be able to reliably compare the attention that one country???s government devotes to an issue to the attention that issue is receiving in other countries. This measure of activity can then be used to test longstanding questions about agenda setting, institutional design, and policy diffusion, among others.The starting point is the Policy Agendas Project originally developed by Baumgartner and Jones for the U.S. (www.policyagendas.org). This system assigns a single label to each event at two levels of discrimination for a total of 19 major topics and 224 subtopics. In the U.S., this topic coding system has been applied to legislative, judicial, executive, and media activities from the Second World War to the present, encompassing nearly one million events in all. Other individual country projects such as that of Denmark are also now well developed, and are generating papers and publications that shed new light on the evolution of politics within particular countries, as well as allowing for the study of broader political science questions (John & Margetts, 2003; Breunig, Green-Pedersen & Mortensen, 2005; Baumgartner and Jones 2006). This paper uses this new system to begin to compare issue attention across six of these countries. We focus on just one form of activity, the production of laws, during a limited time period, 1990-2003. Our goal is to introduce this and begin to investigate some of the comparative questions that these data allow us new approach, discuss some of the unique methodological challenges involved, and introduce three general methods for comparing policymaking patterns across countries. We do not draw any firm conclusions about lawmaking similarities and differences across these systems ??? to do so would be premature for reasons discussed below.