Abstract

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) is an international research programme that studies agenda-setting and policy dynamics by developing systematic indicators of issue attention in a range of political systems and the EU. The project extends the coding techniques developed in the US Policy Agendas Project to compare issue attention and policy activities across time, issues, institutions and countries. The first section of this article reviews the theoretical and empirical foundations of the project. Focusing on existing and ongoing research, the second section shows the potential of the CAP for public policy and comparative politics. The conclusions illustrate the promises of the comparative study of policy agendas in Italy.