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.
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.