Comparative Extension Projects: Denmark About the project The starting point for this project is the argument that the development of the agenda of different political actors is pivotal in understanding contemporary Danish politics as well as politics in other countries. Especially, the development of the party political agendas deserves attention. Whether political parties focus on the environment, law and order or the welfare state has a number of important political consequences. It will affect the agenda of the electorate and thus affect electoral outcomes as well as policy decisions. Political science, however, has not been very focused on agenda setting processes especially in relation to political parties. This may have to do with the fact that agenda setting processes used to be less central to politics - at least in Western Europe. Here it used to be taken for granted that politics should be focused on economic and redistributional issues founded in class conflicts. The whole political system with ideological mass parties was structured around these questions. As class voting has disappeared, political parties have lost members and politics increasingly takes place in the media. The party political agenda has become much more open and this has made agenda setting processes more important. Because political science has not been very interested in agenda setting, there is no extensive theoretical literature which can serve as a starting point. The project therefore combines a number of theoretical perspectives. These are: The American tradition for studying agenda setting and policy making, especially the work of Baumgartner and Jones Literature on political parties and issue competition Literature on the role of mass media in politics Types of data The projects draws on a number of data sets, which makes it possible to systematically trace the development of different actors' agendas. They are all based on content coding of the issues on the agendas and thus make it possible to measure the amount of attention different issues receive on different agendas. Parliamentary Activities: This dataset contains the content of all parliamentary activities in the Danish parliament (question, bills, interpellation, parliamentary decisions and accounts) from 1953 to 2003 Opening speech of the Prime Minister: Each year when parliament opens - the first Tuesday in October - the prime minister gives an opening speech in parliament. This dataset contains all speeches from 1953 to It is still under construction Closing speeches by the Prime Minister: Every year since 1979, the Prime Minister opens the final secession of the parliament before its summer break with a speech on the state of the country. The dataset contains content coding of all speeches from 1979 to It is under construction News Radio: This dataset contains content coding of all radio news at 12 am and 6:30 pm from 1984 to It also contains coding of which actors were present in the news. Finally, the news for part of the period will be coded with regard to whether it focuses on substance or process. The dataset is under construction Expenditure Data: This dataset contains an overview of all public expenditure from 1971 to 2003 categorized by purpose and year. It is based on the international COFOG system with 14 main functions and 34 subfunctions The agenda of the electorate: Two datasets decribe the agenda of the electorate. One is based on the Danish election surveys which ask the "most important problem" questions. This question has also been asked by other surveys which allow to construct a reasonable time series back to This dataset is under construction The other dataset has been bought from "Institut for Konjuktur Analyse", which back to the mid 1980s has asked people how worried they are about different problems Future use of computer assisted coding The material has been coded by hand by a group of student coders. A main advantage of using computer assisted coding for future coding is that this enables coding of large amounts of material in a resource efficient way. Further, it could potentially enhance coding reliability. Most of the material used in the project is, however, not electronically available. For example the content of radio news has been coded based on summaries of each news item in the manuscripts used by the news readers. There are, however, several possibilities in terms of making material available for computer assisted coding: For future coding one option is to scan documents that are only available on paper Other types of documents are available on official websites. For example parliamentary questions can be found on the website of the Danish Parliament Another option is to use news paper articles as the object of coding. These are electronically available in a database owned by a private firm When it comes to coding, one obvious option is to use computers for the coding that has henceforth been coded by hand. The project has focused on three different types of content variables: The political issue focused on in each news item Whether the focus is on the political substance of the issue or the political process The actors such as political parties and interest groups mentioned In the future, an interesting option of expanding the project would be to focus more on the framing of the news. Are political parties and candidates for example referred to positively or negatively? Does the framing of political issues change over time? And which actors try to emphasize which frames? Coding news items in terms of framing is particularly time consuming and there is therefore a significant potential if computer assisted coding can be used here. The research group The Danish Agenda Project is being carried out by a group of researchers at the Department of Political Science, University of Aarhus. The principal investigator is Professor Christoffer Green- Pedersen. The other participants in the group are: Assistant Professor Anne Binderkrantz, Assistant professor Peter Bjerre-Mortensen, post-doc Rune Stubager. Contact information can be found at the project homepage: Figure 1. Number of Different Issues ( ) Figure 3. Proportion of Debates – Specific Issues ( ) Figure 2. Length of Parliamentary Debates ( ) Figure 4. Proportion of Debates – Specific Issues ( )