The Comparative Agendas Project

This chapter looks at what scholars of the CAP community have been interested in and working on during the last decade. What are CAP scholars actually doing with their data? Therefore, the study draws on a meta-analysis of the papers that have been presented at CAP conferences 2006–17. We analyze not only the type of agendas that have been examined, but also whether these analyses tried to grasp effects from one agenda on another, whether the data were comparative (more than one country), whether all issues and thus a general pattern was examined or rather a single (or a few) issues, which countries have been mostly looked at, and all that in a longitudinal perspective. Our meta-analysis suggests that CAP scholars are mostly interested in mainstream political science questions focusing on representation. They use agenda data to answer questions about power and about how politics reacts to societal changes and demands. A notable weakness is the small number of comparative studies; and, so far, inter-country comparison does not seem to be on the rise yet.