The Policy Agendas Project: A review

This paper reviews the Policy Agendas Project, which involves the application of a coding scheme to the content of policy documents, and is used by several of the contributors to this volume. The review describes the evolution and application of the coding frame, which can classify the content of policy documents, and has been used to analyse agenda change in the United States of America. It then examines more recent work that extends the codeframe to European countries and other institutions. After assessing the challenges of applying the method in the comparative context, it concludes that a research programme is underway, which involves a reliable and valid procedure for describing and analysing the content of public policies as they change over time. © 2006 Taylor & Francis.