Comparative Policy Agendas Codebook
Standards. Frank Baumgartner and Will Jennings The following paper presents proposals on policies for the Comparative Agendas Codebook. It reviews some known problem cases for discussion and highlights some general objectives for development of the Comparative Codebook. 1) Policies/Guidelines Rule #1: All sub-topics must be equivalent to, or contained within, a topic in the master codebook. (This means that projects are free to sub-divide topics so long as these can be re-aggregated. Also, transferring sub-topics between major topics is ok, so long as these can be referenced against one sub-topic in the master codebook). Rule #2: Therefore, by definition, never combine existing codes (otherwise you will have to break them apart and re-code them!). Suggestion #1: If teams are interested in particular aspects of attention, we suggest use of dummy variables as a means of enhancing the dataset (e.g. in the UK Speech dataset we assign a dummy variable to the executive and legislative parts of the agenda). Example: in the UK immigration has been coded under 230 instead of 530. As such, major topic analysis considers immigration within Topic 2. For the master codebook, we will ultimately have to make a decision where this goes. Example: if a country wants to divide the 1927 code into 1927.1 for international terrorism at home and 1927.2 for international terrorism abroad that is ok. Example of what not to do: if a country combines banking (1501) and credit cards (1504), that is not ok as it would need to be recoded for comparisons with other countries. 2) New Codes and Coding Problems/Disagreements We propose that any new codes in the Master Codebook must be approved by consensus of the Comparative Agendas Project. We propose that some sort of executive committee of (approx.) 5 members consider proposals for any new codes (e.g. monarchy). We propose that a condition of establishment of new codes is that these are subject to a significant frequency/proportion of observations in X number of countries (i.e. codes that are only relevant in one or two countries and are not found in all the other countries might be better re-coded under XX99 in the master codebook and use dummy variables as suggested above). There are a number of cases where we have discussed problems/disagreements with topic codes. Most have been resolved, but these are worth re-highlighting. Please note any others that need to be considered. - Church and State - Immigration - Terrorism (12/16/19) - Fisheries - Monarchy - Animal Welfare 3) Objectives and Timelines We propose a number of eventual objectives for development of the Comparative Agendas Codebook (in conjunction with the Comparative Agendas website). Within two years we hope to have a fully-functioning comparative website and in preparation for this we propose the following. - An English-language codebook to be produced for each country's coding system. This will highlight country-specific and local examples and discuss or emphasise variation in policy terminology. Where necessary, it will clarify particular coding strategies. We will post a spreadsheet of the master codebook on the Comparative Agendas website, and each country is responsible for ensuring that it's topics correspond to entries in the master codebook. - The national codebook needs to refer to the master codebook (in particular where sub-topics have been moved from the master codebook). |