Comparative Extension Projects: Denmark

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Comparative Extension Projects Denmark
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 www.agendasetting.dk.

• 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 2006. 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 2006. It is under
  construction
• News Radio This dataset contains content coding
  of all radio news at 12 am and 630 pm from 1984
  to 2003. 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 1970. 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.

Figure 1. Number of Different Issues (1953-2003)
Figure 4. Proportion of Debates Specific Issues
(1953-2003)
Figure 3. Proportion of Debates Specific Issues
(1953-2003)
Figure 2. Length of Parliamentary Debates
(1953-2003)