2. The Policy Agenda: Attention, Content, and Style

This chapter opens with an outline of various accounts of policy change, such as structure-induced equilibrium, veto-player theory, incrementalism, the policy network literature, heritage accounts, and policy learning, and discusses the value of detailed narrative accounts. It then introduces the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) and its systematic account of policy change. It provides a justification of the taxonomic principles underlying the coding scheme, briefly describing the Australian data. It makes a clear distinction between policy attention – which is what CAP measures – and content or substance and implementation style, addressed in most other approaches. It provides a justification of why policy attention is so important in studying policy change.