The Spanish Policy Agendas Project has developed different databases for the analysis of the political, the public and the media agenda. Most of these databases include information from the late seventies to present, a period long enough to obtain reliable data and results about the functioning of the Spanish democracy.
At present, we have developped the following datasets:
These databases provide essential indicators to measure policy decisions (passed laws); the direction of political and legislative priorities of the executive and parliamentary groups (bills, annual speeches); symbolic discussions about policy issues (oral questions, parliamentary bills) and the correspondence between the political, the public and the media agenda.
All these databases have been coded according to the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) methodology developed by Baumgartner and Jones in the United States. This coding system has been already adapted to the Spanish political system introducing some revisions in order to adjust the USA coding system to the Spanish context.
The result is a codebook with the following cathegories:
We have also created categorical and dummy variables in order to measure crucial aspects of the Spanish political system like Europeanization (for example identification of those laws which are transposing EU directives, oral questions related to EU decisions, etc); political decentralization (for example laws related to the process of delegation of political power to the Comunidades Autónomas); and general transformations of the political system like changes in the government, type of governments (minority of majority), etc.
The datasets and codebooks of the Spanish Policy Agendas Project are available on this site free of charge for research, academic activities and other non-commercial purposes.