The Spanish Policy Agendas Project is aimed to contribute to the analysis of issue prioritization and policy dynamics –how and why the Spanish political agenda changes over time— from transition to democracy to present. The main goal is to identify the variations of the list of problems that are object of important attention within the Spanish political system; and to give an explanation of why these variations occur, to what extend issue prioritization follows public preferences, and how policy actors –especially mass-media— contribute to explain variations in the prioritization of issues across time. At present, our research goals focus in the analysis of the impact of the mass-media upon the political and public agenda, the transformations of political representation in a multilevel system of governance, and policy convergence across time and policy issues.

This research project builds on the work done by Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones (1993, 2005) about policy dynamics developed in the Comparative Policy Agendas Project –an ambitious attempt to provide comparable measures of policy change in the United States since the Second World War—. For the last years, the Policy Agendas Project became an international network of scholars from USA, Canada and several European countries (Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK) aimed to the analysis of issue prioritization and policy dynamics in a comparative perspective.

The Spanish Policy Agendas Project has the support of the European Science Foundation (ESF) as a research project of the European Collaborative Research Projects in the Social Sciences (Eurocores); the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación as a project of the Plan Nacional de Investigación Científica (CSO-2009-09397) and Agència de Gestió d'Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) as a Grup de Recerca (SGR 536).

At present the members of the project are Laura Chaqués, Anna Palau, Luz Muñoz, Ferran Davesa and Mariel Julio.

Contact: laurachaques@ub.edu