Policy agendas in Germany – database and descriptive insights

ABSTRACT

Agenda-setting focuses on how political issues emerge within society, enter parliamentary debates and are responded to by government decisions. We introduce a database that traces policy issues in Germany between 1978 and 2017. These political activities include political inputs (public opinion), processes (party manifestos, parliamentary questions and government speeches), as well as outputs (laws). Each activity’s topic is identified using the Comparative Policy Agendas scheme. Collectively, these observations comprise the policy agendas of Germany. We highlight the database potential by describing all German policy issues for the 39-year period and by tracking how immigration became a political issue.

KEYWORDS:

• Agenda-setting
• public policy
• political parties
• Germany
• comparative dataset

Acknowledgements

We thank Sophie Baumann, Tobias Bertermann, Felix Busch, Alina Engstroem, Matthias Frey, Daniel Jochum, Dominik Kunert, Jonathan Klüser, Christian Mende, Samuel Müller, Sane Oehlers, Marco Radojevic, Henrike Rapp, Philipp Scherer, Julia Schleißheimer, Alina Schober, Joschua Seitz and Anne-Kathrin Stroppe for their dedicated and meticulous work on the data and their spirited arguments about coding disagreements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We thank an anonymous reviewer for these helpful suggestions.

Additional information

Funding

Christian Breunig and Benjamin Guinaudeau were supported by the German Science Foundation [Grant 414/16] – Conditional Responsiveness. The project also received support from the AFF at the University of Konstanz.