Limited Agenda Space and
Policy Priorities
The Policy Agendas Project (described elsewhere on this site) traces changing attention to public policy issues over time and across policy making venues. The bill introduction project adds an important components to this data collection project, by providing a context for appreciating the activities of committees. In contrast to holding a congressional hearing, introducing a bill is easy. When bills are coding for policy content in conformity with the Policy Agendas coding system, we are in a position to compare the legislative salience of issues (defined by introduced bills), with the public salience of issues (New York Times stories or Most Important Problem data), and with more intense activity by committees or legislatures.
The working assumption is that constraints of time and resources require legislatures to focus. The question of interest, is what leads them to focus on some policy issues at the expense of others. The public policy agenda setting literature tells us that politics, rather than objective circumstances drives issue attention. Our dataset will allow us to test this claim (and many others) systematically by comparing changing patterns of activity over 50 years across the 220 subtopics of the Policy Agendas data. In addition to focusing on general legislative activity, we will also be able to systematically study changing patterns in policy priorities within specific policy domains such as health.
T. Jens Feeley (Ph.D.) and John Wilkerson.
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