Shaun Bevan
Biographic Data
| ID | 292382 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shaun Bevan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Shaun |
| FAMILY NAME | Bevan |
| SIGNATURE | BEVAN S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Edinburgh |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7717-7822 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 762 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Administrating crisis is just a transition: Interventions on bureaucratic activity in the United Kingdom, 1987–2022
Do different parties respond to different problems? A comparative study of parliamentary questions across multiple countries
The identification of problem information is an important driver of political attention in parliament. This is widely acknowledged in the literature on party competition but there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the extent and when it matters. By relying on an extensive cross-country data set matching data on the policy content of parliamentary oral questions from ten European parliamentary democracies with well-established pro…
The comparative agendas project in Latin America: Data and coding
This paper introduces the Comparative Agendas Project system of coding as well as a wealth of gathered and in process data from Latin America using this established and reliable system for capturing policy attention comparatively and over time. While this is not the first introduction of the coding system, it is the first introduction aimed at Latin America and a new type of political system beyond North American and European democracies. First, …
O Comparative Agendas Project na América Latina: Dados e codificação
This paper introduces the Comparative Agendas Project system of coding as well as a wealth of gathered and in process data from Latin America using this established and reliable system for capturing policy attention comparatively and over time. While this is not the first introduction of the coding system, it is the first introduction aimed at Latin America and a new type of political system beyond North American and European democracies. First, …
Devolution is secondary: What drives Scottish secondary legislation
The reopening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 marked a great opportunity to create a modern government connected to the people. In spite of this, work on responsiveness and the functioning of policy‐making in Scotland since devolution has not been as extensive as it could be. This is certainly true of one of the most common and numerous policy‐making activities undertaken by Scotland and indeed all UK governments, the production of secondary l…
When Does Government Listen to the Public? Voluntary Associations and Dynamic Agenda Representation in the United States
The aim of the article is to examine how the population size of voluntary associations affects the process through which the public's issue priorities are translated into policy priorities. We conduct a time series analysis of political attention in executive and legislative agendas at the U.S. federal level in the period 1971–2001, covering all issues addressed by the U.S. government. We show that the number of voluntary associations in a policy…
Gone Fishing: The Creation of the Comparative Agendas Project Master Codebook
Every data-gathering effort is a story, often a horror story from the perspective of those that created it. This chapter presents a historical tale of the creation and logic behind the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) Master Codebook. The CAP is in reality a network of many projects aimed at classifying political agendas according to the policies they address. However, with no central administration or common source of funding the original codin…
The effect of public attitudes toward the European Union on European Commission policy activity
This study tests the relationship between public attitudes regarding the European Union and unilateral adoption of legal acts by the European Commission (i.e. directives and regulations). Relying on theories of policy responsiveness, as well as legislative gridlock, we present two hypotheses with competing expectations regarding the effect of public attitudes toward the European Union on policy-making activity in the European Commission. The firs…
Problem detection in legislative oversight: An analysis of legislative committee agendas in the UK and US
This paper outlines a dynamic problem-detection model of legislative oversight where legislative committees engage in information-gathering to identify emerging policy problems. It is argued that activities of legislative committees are responsive to indicators of problem status across a range of policy domains. This enables committees to react to problems before, or at least simultaneously to, citizens. Our analyses use a new dataset on the poli…
Cross-national partisan effects on agenda stability
Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that policy attention reacts more to world events. Yet, a rigorous examination of the ways in which change in the partisan composition of government matters for the distribution of policies across issues has yet to be completed in a cross-national framework. Combining data on policy output from the Comparative Agendas Project, the authors present a detailed…
Changing the transmission belt: The programme-to-policy link in Italy between the First and Second Republic
This article analyses the transmission of policy priorities from electoral campaigns to legislative outputs under different institutional configurations. Taking an agenda-setting approach, the article tests whether a mandate effect exists, if incumbents also uptake the priorities of their competitors, and whether and how the introduction of alternation in government impacts on these dynamics. The analysis relies on data sets of the Italian Agenda…
Party mandates and the politics of attention: Party platforms, public priorities and the policy agenda in Britain
This article develops an attention-based model of party mandates and policy agendas, where parties and governments are faced with an abundance of issues and must divide their scarce attention across them. In government, parties must balance their desire to deliver on their electoral mandate (i.e. the ‘promissory agenda’) with a need to continuously adapt their policy priorities in response to changes in public concerns and to deal with unexpected…
An analysis of the public's personal, national and EU issue priorities
Scholars characterize decision-making in the European Union (EU) as increasingly dispersed across different levels of political authority. This has implications for political representation. Yet, little is known about whether and how public opinion differs across levels of governance. In this paper, we consider evaluations of issue priorities. Specifically, we use data from the Eurobarometer to evaluate the degree of correspondence between issues…
Policy Representation by Party Leaders and Followers: What Drives UK Prime Minister’s Questions
This article demonstrates how party leaders (frontbenchers) and backbenchers use their access to UK Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to represent the policy agenda. Building on comparative research on parliamentary questions and agenda-setting as well as taking account of the particular context of PMQs, we argue that party leaders and followers draw attention to different kinds of policy topics with the express purpose of influencing the governm…
Looking for the party? The effects of partisan change on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament
Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of dat…
Do the media set the parliamentary agenda? A comparative study in seven countries
A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda‐setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single‐country studies has suggested a number of general agenda‐setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including com…
Responsive elections: The effect of public opinion on political campaigns
Bureaucratic Responsiveness: Effects of Elected Government, Public Agendas and European Attention on the Uk Bureaucracy
What determines the bureaucratic agenda? This article combines insights from models of bureaucratic behaviour with agenda‐setting models of government attention to test the effects of elected government, public, and EU agendas on the bureaucratic agenda. Using time series cross‐sectional analyses of subject and ministry coded data on UK statutory instruments from 1987 to 2008, I find strong effects for both the elected government and EU legislati…
Popular Presidents Can Affect Congressional Attention, for a Little While: Presidents Can Affect Congressional Attention
Does the president have the ability to set the congressional agenda? Agenda setting is a prerequisite for influence, so this is an important element in understanding presidential–legislative relations. We focus on the State of the Union address and show that popular presidents can, indeed, cause Congress to shift attention to those topics most emphasized. The impact is tempered by divided government and time, however. No matter the state of divid…
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). Atte…
Representation, agendas and institutions
Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between…
Policy Agendas in British Politics
Using a unique dataset spanning fifty years of policy-making in Britain, this book traces how topics like the economy, international affairs, and crime have shifted in importance. It takes a new appro
Continuing the Collective Action Dilemma: The Survival of Voluntary Associations in the United States
Group populations take many different types of actions in order to influence government, but how those actions are received depends on the traits of group populations. This article uses data on national-level voluntary associations in the United States from 1974 to 1999 to investigate group survival and discuss how it affects representation. The results demonstrate the existence of density dependence, significant positive effects for group-level …
Understanding selection bias, time-lags and measurement bias in secondary data sources: Putting the Encyclopedia of Associations database in broader context
The economy, crime and time: An analysis of recorded property crime in England & Wales 1961–2006
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). Atte…
Representation, agendas and institutions
Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between…
Effects of the Core Functions of Government on the Diversity of Executive Agendas
The distribution of attention across issues is of fundamental importance to the political agenda and outputs of government. This article presents an issue-based theory of the diversity of governing agendas where the core functions of government—defense, international affairs, the economy, government operations, and the rule of law—are prioritized ahead of all other issues. It undertakes comparative analysis of issue diversity of the executive age…
Do the media set the parliamentary agenda? A comparative study in seven countries
A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda‐setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single‐country studies has suggested a number of general agenda‐setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including com…
The Agenda of British Government: The Speech from the Throne, 1911-2008
This article considers how UK governments use the Speech from the Throne (also known as the Gracious Speech and the King's or the Queen's Speech) to define and articulate their executive and legislative agenda. The analysis uses the policy content coding system of the Policy Agendas Project to measure total executive and legislative attention to particular issues. This generates the longest known data series of the political agenda in the UK, fro…
When Does Government Listen to the Public? Voluntary Associations and Dynamic Agenda Representation in the United States
The aim of the article is to examine how the population size of voluntary associations affects the process through which the public's issue priorities are translated into policy priorities. We conduct a time series analysis of political attention in executive and legislative agendas at the U.S. federal level in the period 1971–2001, covering all issues addressed by the U.S. government. We show that the number of voluntary associations in a policy…
Party mandates and the politics of attention: Party platforms, public priorities and the policy agenda in Britain
This article develops an attention-based model of party mandates and policy agendas, where parties and governments are faced with an abundance of issues and must divide their scarce attention across them. In government, parties must balance their desire to deliver on their electoral mandate (i.e. the ‘promissory agenda’) with a need to continuously adapt their policy priorities in response to changes in public concerns and to deal with unexpected…
Policy Representation by Party Leaders and Followers: What Drives UK Prime Minister’s Questions
This article demonstrates how party leaders (frontbenchers) and backbenchers use their access to UK Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to represent the policy agenda. Building on comparative research on parliamentary questions and agenda-setting as well as taking account of the particular context of PMQs, we argue that party leaders and followers draw attention to different kinds of policy topics with the express purpose of influencing the governm…
What Are Policy Punctuations? Large Changes in the Legislative Agenda of the UK Government, 1911–2008
In this article, we argue that policy punctuations differ from each other in ways that reflect distinct types of political change. We identify three main kinds. The first are procedural changes that have unique unrelated policies within the same issue area. Within the remaining large policy changes, high‐salience punctuations are associated with increased attention in the media, whereas low‐salience punctuations do not attract such scrutiny. The …
Keeping party programmes on track: The transmission of the policy agendas of executive speeches to legislative outputs in the United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, the transmission between policy promises and statutes is assumed to be both rapid and efficient because of the tradition of party discipline, relative stability of government, absence of coalitions, and the limited powers of legislative revision in the second chamber. Even in the United Kingdom, the transmission is not perfect since legislative priorities and outputs are susceptible to changes in public opinion or media cov…
Popular Presidents Can Affect Congressional Attention, for a Little While: Presidents Can Affect Congressional Attention
Does the president have the ability to set the congressional agenda? Agenda setting is a prerequisite for influence, so this is an important element in understanding presidential–legislative relations. We focus on the State of the Union address and show that popular presidents can, indeed, cause Congress to shift attention to those topics most emphasized. The impact is tempered by divided government and time, however. No matter the state of divid…
The effect of public attitudes toward the European Union on European Commission policy activity
This study tests the relationship between public attitudes regarding the European Union and unilateral adoption of legal acts by the European Commission (i.e. directives and regulations). Relying on theories of policy responsiveness, as well as legislative gridlock, we present two hypotheses with competing expectations regarding the effect of public attitudes toward the European Union on policy-making activity in the European Commission. The firs…
Cross-national partisan effects on agenda stability
Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that policy attention reacts more to world events. Yet, a rigorous examination of the ways in which change in the partisan composition of government matters for the distribution of policies across issues has yet to be completed in a cross-national framework. Combining data on policy output from the Comparative Agendas Project, the authors present a detailed…
Looking for the party? The effects of partisan change on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament
Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of dat…
Continuing the Collective Action Dilemma: The Survival of Voluntary Associations in the United States
Group populations take many different types of actions in order to influence government, but how those actions are received depends on the traits of group populations. This article uses data on national-level voluntary associations in the United States from 1974 to 1999 to investigate group survival and discuss how it affects representation. The results demonstrate the existence of density dependence, significant positive effects for group-level …
Bureaucratic Responsiveness: Effects of Elected Government, Public Agendas and European Attention on the Uk Bureaucracy
What determines the bureaucratic agenda? This article combines insights from models of bureaucratic behaviour with agenda‐setting models of government attention to test the effects of elected government, public, and EU agendas on the bureaucratic agenda. Using time series cross‐sectional analyses of subject and ministry coded data on UK statutory instruments from 1987 to 2008, I find strong effects for both the elected government and EU legislati…
An analysis of the public's personal, national and EU issue priorities
Scholars characterize decision-making in the European Union (EU) as increasingly dispersed across different levels of political authority. This has implications for political representation. Yet, little is known about whether and how public opinion differs across levels of governance. In this paper, we consider evaluations of issue priorities. Specifically, we use data from the Eurobarometer to evaluate the degree of correspondence between issues…
The policy-opinion link and institutional change: The legislative agenda of the UK and Scottish Parliaments
Institutions can affect the degree to which public opinion influences policy by determining the clarity of responsibility in decision-making. The sharing of power between national and devolved levels of government makes it difficult for the public to attribute responsibility for decisions. In the UK, this generates the prediction that the devolution of power to territorial units weakens the effect of public opinion on policy both for the UK and S…
The economy, crime and time: An analysis of recorded property crime in England & Wales 1961–2006
Comparer les productions législatives: Enjeux et méthodes
Sur quels enjeux politiques les parlements légifèrent-ils ? Cette interrogation d’apparence anodine n’a que rarement fait l’objet d’une attention soutenue, particulièrement dans une perspective comparée. Pourtant la production des lois constitue l’un des éléments structurants d’une communauté politique et de la compétition démocratique. Dans cet article, notre objectif est à la fois d’étudier la « politique de l’attention » au sein de l’agenda lé…
Problem detection in legislative oversight: An analysis of legislative committee agendas in the UK and US
This paper outlines a dynamic problem-detection model of legislative oversight where legislative committees engage in information-gathering to identify emerging policy problems. It is argued that activities of legislative committees are responsive to indicators of problem status across a range of policy domains. This enables committees to react to problems before, or at least simultaneously to, citizens. Our analyses use a new dataset on the poli…
Changing the transmission belt: The programme-to-policy link in Italy between the First and Second Republic
This article analyses the transmission of policy priorities from electoral campaigns to legislative outputs under different institutional configurations. Taking an agenda-setting approach, the article tests whether a mandate effect exists, if incumbents also uptake the priorities of their competitors, and whether and how the introduction of alternation in government impacts on these dynamics. The analysis relies on data sets of the Italian Agenda…
Do different parties respond to different problems? A comparative study of parliamentary questions across multiple countries
The identification of problem information is an important driver of political attention in parliament. This is widely acknowledged in the literature on party competition but there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the extent and when it matters. By relying on an extensive cross-country data set matching data on the policy content of parliamentary oral questions from ten European parliamentary democracies with well-established pro…
Understanding selection bias, time-lags and measurement bias in secondary data sources: Putting the Encyclopedia of Associations database in broader context
Responsive elections: The effect of public opinion on political campaigns
Comparer les productions législatives: Enjeux et méthodes
Sur quels enjeux politiques les parlements légifèrent-ils ? Cette interrogation d’apparence anodine n’a que rarement fait l’objet d’une attention soutenue, particulièrement dans une perspective comparée. Pourtant la production des lois constitue l’un des éléments structurants d’une communauté politique et de la compétition démocratique. Dans cet article, notre objectif est à la fois d’étudier la « politique de l’attention » au sein de l’agenda lé…
The Agenda of British Government: The Speech from the Throne, 1911-2008
This article considers how UK governments use the Speech from the Throne (also known as the Gracious Speech and the King's or the Queen's Speech) to define and articulate their executive and legislative agenda. The analysis uses the policy content coding system of the Policy Agendas Project to measure total executive and legislative attention to particular issues. This generates the longest known data series of the political agenda in the UK, fro…
The policy-opinion link and institutional change: The legislative agenda of the UK and Scottish Parliaments
Institutions can affect the degree to which public opinion influences policy by determining the clarity of responsibility in decision-making. The sharing of power between national and devolved levels of government makes it difficult for the public to attribute responsibility for decisions. In the UK, this generates the prediction that the devolution of power to territorial units weakens the effect of public opinion on policy both for the UK and S…
Keeping party programmes on track: The transmission of the policy agendas of executive speeches to legislative outputs in the United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, the transmission between policy promises and statutes is assumed to be both rapid and efficient because of the tradition of party discipline, relative stability of government, absence of coalitions, and the limited powers of legislative revision in the second chamber. Even in the United Kingdom, the transmission is not perfect since legislative priorities and outputs are susceptible to changes in public opinion or media cov…
Effects of the Core Functions of Government on the Diversity of Executive Agendas
The distribution of attention across issues is of fundamental importance to the political agenda and outputs of government. This article presents an issue-based theory of the diversity of governing agendas where the core functions of government—defense, international affairs, the economy, government operations, and the rule of law—are prioritized ahead of all other issues. It undertakes comparative analysis of issue diversity of the executive age…
The economy, crime and time: An analysis of recorded property crime in England & Wales 1961–2006
What Are Policy Punctuations? Large Changes in the Legislative Agenda of the UK Government, 1911–2008
In this article, we argue that policy punctuations differ from each other in ways that reflect distinct types of political change. We identify three main kinds. The first are procedural changes that have unique unrelated policies within the same issue area. Within the remaining large policy changes, high‐salience punctuations are associated with increased attention in the media, whereas low‐salience punctuations do not attract such scrutiny. The …
Policy Agendas in British Politics
Using a unique dataset spanning fifty years of policy-making in Britain, this book traces how topics like the economy, international affairs, and crime have shifted in importance. It takes a new appro
Continuing the Collective Action Dilemma: The Survival of Voluntary Associations in the United States
Group populations take many different types of actions in order to influence government, but how those actions are received depends on the traits of group populations. This article uses data on national-level voluntary associations in the United States from 1974 to 1999 to investigate group survival and discuss how it affects representation. The results demonstrate the existence of density dependence, significant positive effects for group-level …
Understanding selection bias, time-lags and measurement bias in secondary data sources: Putting the Encyclopedia of Associations database in broader context
Bureaucratic Responsiveness: Effects of Elected Government, Public Agendas and European Attention on the Uk Bureaucracy
What determines the bureaucratic agenda? This article combines insights from models of bureaucratic behaviour with agenda‐setting models of government attention to test the effects of elected government, public, and EU agendas on the bureaucratic agenda. Using time series cross‐sectional analyses of subject and ministry coded data on UK statutory instruments from 1987 to 2008, I find strong effects for both the elected government and EU legislati…
Popular Presidents Can Affect Congressional Attention, for a Little While: Presidents Can Affect Congressional Attention
Does the president have the ability to set the congressional agenda? Agenda setting is a prerequisite for influence, so this is an important element in understanding presidential–legislative relations. We focus on the State of the Union address and show that popular presidents can, indeed, cause Congress to shift attention to those topics most emphasized. The impact is tempered by divided government and time, however. No matter the state of divid…
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). Atte…
Representation, agendas and institutions
Dynamic agenda representation can be understood through the transmission of the priorities of the public onto the policy priorities of government. The pattern of representation in policy agendas is mediated through institutions due to friction (i.e., organisational and cognitive costs imposed on change) in decision making and variation in the scarcity of policy makers' attention. This article builds on extant studies of the correspondence between…
Responsive elections: The effect of public opinion on political campaigns
An analysis of the public's personal, national and EU issue priorities
Scholars characterize decision-making in the European Union (EU) as increasingly dispersed across different levels of political authority. This has implications for political representation. Yet, little is known about whether and how public opinion differs across levels of governance. In this paper, we consider evaluations of issue priorities. Specifically, we use data from the Eurobarometer to evaluate the degree of correspondence between issues…
Policy Representation by Party Leaders and Followers: What Drives UK Prime Minister’s Questions
This article demonstrates how party leaders (frontbenchers) and backbenchers use their access to UK Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) to represent the policy agenda. Building on comparative research on parliamentary questions and agenda-setting as well as taking account of the particular context of PMQs, we argue that party leaders and followers draw attention to different kinds of policy topics with the express purpose of influencing the governm…
Looking for the party? The effects of partisan change on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament
Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of dat…
Do the media set the parliamentary agenda? A comparative study in seven countries
A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda‐setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single‐country studies has suggested a number of general agenda‐setting patterns but these have never been confirmed in a comparative approach. In a comparative, longitudinal design including com…
Party mandates and the politics of attention: Party platforms, public priorities and the policy agenda in Britain
This article develops an attention-based model of party mandates and policy agendas, where parties and governments are faced with an abundance of issues and must divide their scarce attention across them. In government, parties must balance their desire to deliver on their electoral mandate (i.e. the ‘promissory agenda’) with a need to continuously adapt their policy priorities in response to changes in public concerns and to deal with unexpected…
Cross-national partisan effects on agenda stability
Studies of policy attention find only mixed support for a partisan impact, instead showing that policy attention reacts more to world events. Yet, a rigorous examination of the ways in which change in the partisan composition of government matters for the distribution of policies across issues has yet to be completed in a cross-national framework. Combining data on policy output from the Comparative Agendas Project, the authors present a detailed…
Changing the transmission belt: The programme-to-policy link in Italy between the First and Second Republic
This article analyses the transmission of policy priorities from electoral campaigns to legislative outputs under different institutional configurations. Taking an agenda-setting approach, the article tests whether a mandate effect exists, if incumbents also uptake the priorities of their competitors, and whether and how the introduction of alternation in government impacts on these dynamics. The analysis relies on data sets of the Italian Agenda…
Gone Fishing: The Creation of the Comparative Agendas Project Master Codebook
Every data-gathering effort is a story, often a horror story from the perspective of those that created it. This chapter presents a historical tale of the creation and logic behind the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) Master Codebook. The CAP is in reality a network of many projects aimed at classifying political agendas according to the policies they address. However, with no central administration or common source of funding the original codin…
The effect of public attitudes toward the European Union on European Commission policy activity
This study tests the relationship between public attitudes regarding the European Union and unilateral adoption of legal acts by the European Commission (i.e. directives and regulations). Relying on theories of policy responsiveness, as well as legislative gridlock, we present two hypotheses with competing expectations regarding the effect of public attitudes toward the European Union on policy-making activity in the European Commission. The firs…
Problem detection in legislative oversight: An analysis of legislative committee agendas in the UK and US
This paper outlines a dynamic problem-detection model of legislative oversight where legislative committees engage in information-gathering to identify emerging policy problems. It is argued that activities of legislative committees are responsive to indicators of problem status across a range of policy domains. This enables committees to react to problems before, or at least simultaneously to, citizens. Our analyses use a new dataset on the poli…
Political science (29 works) · Law (23 works) · Politics (22 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (21 works) · Law (21 works) · Political Influence and Corporate Strategies (21 works) · Public Administration (21 works) · Public Administration (20 works) · Government (linguistics (17 works) · Economics (14 works)