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Colleagues,
   We are announcing the availability of two of the four data sets that
were assembled by us (with funding from NSF, UW, and Texas A&M) for the
study of changes in the national public policy agenda since the Second
World War.  The data are available at the website of Center for American
Politics and Public Policy at the University of Washington, URL address:

http://weber.u.washington.edu/~ampol/

To access the data sets directly, you can use:

http://weber.u.washington.edu/~ampol/agendasproject.html


The data sets currently available are:  1) all congressional hearings
conducted, 1946-94 that have been released by CIS (CIS has not released
all contemporaneously unpublished hearings; we provide complete notes);
and 2) congressional budget authority, by OMB subfunction, FY1947-95.

The hearings data are coded by a variety of variables, but the most
interesting may be a set of content codes (21 topics and about 200
subtopics) and committee/subcommittee.  Researchers can determine whether
the hearings related to bills or oversight, among other things.  Data are
complete through 1993; only partial data are available for 1994, and
contain about 70,000 records.

The budget data solve a previously-problematic issue in budgetary
analysis.  Budget authority at the subfunction level have previously been
available in a temporally consistent manner since 1974; outlays data (less
satisfactory for studying political decision-making) are available
consistently at the subfunction level since 1962.

In the future we will be releasing three other agenda/policy related data
sets: all statutes passed; all CQ stories written for CQ's Annual
Editions; and a sample of NYT stories.  All will be coded according to the
same policy content categories (with some additions for the NYT stories).

                        --Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner


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