The Rise and Decline of Issues in Congress

How has Congressional attention to issues changed since World War II? Has there been a substantive shift in focus to new issues? What may be responsible for these changes?

This scenario presents an example of how to explore these questions using the Policy Agendas Project Graph Examples (preconstructed figures) and Data Tools resources.

The scenario is based on Frank Baumgartner's Paper, "Social Movements and the Rise of New Issues." The paper was presented at the Conference on Social Movements, Public Policy and Democracy at the University of California, Irvine, on January 11-13, 2002. Click here for the paper abstract

Graph Example

The two charts below (taken from the paper cited above) compare congressional attention (expressed as percent of days of hearings) to old and new issues over time.

Click on the thumbnails below to view a larger picture in a new window.

	The chart to the left displays the rise of new issues--including Environment, Health, and Law Crime and Family Issues.
	This chart displays the decline of old issues, including Government Operations, Public Lands and Water Management, and Defense Issues.

The charts show that there has been a substantive shift in attention to new issues in Congress since World War II. Increasingly more hearings focus on new "social" issues, relative to the older, traditional issues. Frank Baumgartner's research about the role of social movements is based on these initial findings, and he argues that as social movement activity has increased, so has Congressional attention to these issues.

To explore shifting issue attention in more detail, go to the Data Tools section below to conduct a customized search.   Examples of additional research are below.

Data Tools: Using the Analysis Tool for Additional Research

Which subtopics within each of these "new" issues that have contributed the most to the rise of these issues? How have patterns of attention to different subtopics within each of these issues changed over time? What are some other major topic issues that display distinctive patterns?

Our analysis tool allows the user to easily access the Policy Agendas Data, enabling them to conduct customized searches view shifts in policy attention and address some of the above questions.

Exercises using the policy analysis tool:

1. Replicate these results
   Follow a detailed example or Do the exercise yourself
2. Find patterns of attention in Congress to other major issues.
   Follow a detailed example or Do the exercise yourself

Downloading the data sets

If you are interested in conducting additional research, such as following Professor Baumgartner's example of analyzing attention to issues by looking at how many days of hearings were allocated to each issue over time, you can download the raw datasets from our data set index.