The Comparative Agendas Project

Abstract

The introductory chapter responds to several goals. It first provides some historical elements concerning the emergence and the development of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). The project grew out of individual national projects, which initially only aimed at providing a historical and more systematic infrastructure to the study of public policy. The cooperation between those national projects facilitated the emergence of common codebook. This, in turned, encouraged the emergence of comparative projects. Finally, we show that these different steps are currently contributing to redefine and develop the field of comparative public policy.