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Policy Analysis Tool Overview

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About the Policy Analysis Tool

How has congressional attention to policy issues changed over time?
Does attention to environmental issues decline as attention to the economy increases?
How closely does congressional attention to the environment track with media attention to environmental issues?

The Policy Agendas Project codes policymaking activity in 19 major topics and 220 subtopics. Each event (a Senate hearing in 1991 for example) is designated as being primarily about one, and only one, major topic, and one subtopic within that major topic.

The Policy Analysis tool allows you to chart and analyze trends of these major topics over time. Users can analyze attention to different policy topics across venues, utilizing the tool's access to all of the Policy Agendas Projects' databases. In addition, several of the datasets include various filters which if selected will narrow your search. These filters are not mutually exclusive and records can be selected based on any number of characteristics. For example, if you select several of the Hearing dataset's filters, each record will either be included or excluded in the analysis depending on whether it has satisfied all of your criteria.

See the scenarios for examples of using the analysis tool.

Click to see larger image of what the policy analysis tool does.

The picture to the left shows the basic concept of the analysis tool. (Click on the image to see a larger picture.)
The major topics and datasets are listed on the main query form.
Many of the datasets have filters which allow users to narrow their search .

There are brief instructions in the left column of the query form. However, to fully appreciate what you can do with this tool, we encourage you to read the Policy Tool Tutorial and the Chart Tutorial.

Browser Issues:

The Chart produced from the Policy Analysis Tool works best with Internet Explorer and Netscape Browsers. When IE or Netscape users first access the chart feature, they are prompted to download the ChartFX plug-in. If you have any difficulty downloading this plug-in, please contact us at ampol@u.washington.edu.

Note to Mozilla users: The Chart will appear; however, none of the editing features are available.

Note to Opera users: No chart will appear. A data table does appear so that you may download this information into Excel or another data management program.

Ready? Go to the Policy Analysis Tool