Topic Tracking
Have you ever stopped to wonder why an issue suddenly seems to appear in virtually all media outlets simultaneously? So did Frank Baumgartner and his colleague, Bryan Jones, a professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Using the issue of child abuse as an example, Baumgartner points out that in the mid-1980s, there was a huge surge in government attention to the issue.
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Dr. Frank Baumgartner Distinguished Professor of Political Science |
"There was no reason why the issue of child abuse shouldn't have been a huge concern in, say, the 1930s," says the Distinguished Professor of Political Science. "Since this is one of those issues that cannot really be monitored to know if conditions are getting better or worse, how does the government know if it should be a priority?"
Baumgartner and Jones decided to find out. The result, the Policy Agendas Project, is an nearly exhaustive resource of information that has provided—and continues to provide—an invaluable service to the public by providing data which tracks government attention to a panoply of issues. Such information sharing is a critical component of the University's land grant mission. The fifteen-year-old project, which is used—and increasingly, replicated—all over the world, also serves as one of Baumgartner's most effective teaching tools.
"The Policy Agendas Project began as an attempt to provide comparable measures of policy changes since the 1940s," he explains. "The state of the economy has been the only field that has been historically tracked. Other than that, there have never been a valid or reliable set of measurements for all other social issues and public policy."
Funded by the National Science Foundation, the project has now gone well beyond tracking the 70,000 congressional hearings, which are organized by date, the policymakers present, and the topic, with which it began. The Policy Agendas Project now includes databases from a host of sources, all organized around a common set of about 225 topics. Public policy on the subject of water pollution, for example, is traceable through Congressional laws; through news stories written by the New York Times; through every relevant sentence uttered in every Presidential State-of-the-Union speech; through the entire federal budget, through every decision by the Supreme Court; and through every story written about it in the Congressional Quarterly Almanac, in every bill introduced in Congress, among many other resources. The project covers the entire period since World War II.
"This has allowed us to study the processes of disproportional government responses comprehensively rather than one issue at a time and through only one venue," says Baumgartner. "Now we have an exhaustive record of all government activity across all policy issues since the mid-1940s."
Further, the project often demonstrates a disconnection between real government action and public perception. For example, government attention to crime has only occasionally been associated with the actual crime rate, Baumgartner points out. There was a period, in the late 1960s and 1970s when the crime rate went up noticeably and then-President Nixon declared a "war on crime." Since then, government attention to the issue of crime has never again been so strongly related to the actual rate. The crime rate has significantly declined but government officials still want to talk about the issue often because it's a winning political issue.
"The project would not have been possible before the computer age," Baumgartner says. The long-term objective of the Policy Agendas Project is to provide an organizational gateway to a virtual digital policy library so that citizens, the media, and government officials themselves can track policy changes and how responsive these changes have been both to actual events and public opinion. Just as it is important to track changing economic conditions and policies, which government has tracked systematically for decades, so too is having knowledge about other, non-economic issues. Through these data, we can see if government policy shifts are more responsive to public opinion, to shifting societal conditions, or to interested lobbying groups, for example.
Baumgartner has begun collaborating with colleagues at Temple, University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pennsylvania, and Penn State Harrisburg on a comparable project for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Projects are underway in France, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the UK, and are in the planning stages for other countries as well.
Baumgartner organizes some of his classes around learning how to use the project data to conduct original research. Besides employing students to work on the project—it needs to be updated constantly—Baumgartner requires his undergraduates to do a paper on a topic that is listed in the database. He proudly displays his most recent student papers which include twenty-five page research papers comparing policy history and government response on energy policy, bankruptcy, privacy rights and government surveillance, and immigration reform, all topics in the Policy Agendas Project.
"This project integrates students into research, as workers and also in the pedagogical process in the classroom," he says. "I think a lot of people see those goals as antithetical, but I find there is great synergy between teaching and research."