About Us

Objectives of the Policy Agendas Project

The Policy Agendas Project is an ambitious attempt to provide truly comparable measures of policy changes in the United States since the Second World War. Systematic policy comparisons have eluded students of public policy change because of the absence of a valid and reliable set of categories of policy activity. Economists devised the National Income Accounts to be able to track the state of the economy reliably; in an analogous manner, the Policy Agendas Project tracks policy changes in the United States reliably. Users can be assured that our reported measures of policy change have the same fundamental meaning across the years, something that cannot be guaranteed without the meticulous coding and reliability standards we impose.

Modern information technology allows users of this website to trace, graph, and download policy changes in many different arenas at the click of a mouse. By providing direct information on the sources of our measures of policy changes, this website also allows users to access the original material that can provide the historical context of policy choice.

The unique contribution of the Policy Agendas Project is in unifying the ability to trace policy trends reliably with the ability to access immediately on-line full texts of source policy documents from linked websites. Our long-run objective is to provide a systematic gateway to a virtual digital policy library through ‘guided search’.

Staff

The project is directed by Bryan Jones and John Wilkerson of the University of Washington and Frank Baumgartner of Pennsylvania State University.

Funding

This project is made possible with funds from the National Science Foundation (Grant No. 0111443 ), the University of Washington, and Pennsylvania State University.