IPPA - Comparative Public Policy

Building an Infrastructure for the Study of Comparative Public Policy

The past generation has seen dramatic shifts in the study of comparative public policy, and the next generation will see even more. Thirty years ago, it was rare to see multi-country studies of particular public policies and theoretically driven comparisons of institutions of the welfare state were limited. Today, younger scholars are discouraged from looking at only one country, once the dominant research strategy. What are the promises and pitfalls of large international networks of research collaboration in the field of public policy?

Frank Baumgartner has been involved in reviewing the growth and development of the Comparative Agendas Project. In his keynote speech to the Fourth International Conference on Public Policy (ICPP4), he discusses the potential for a large-scale international collaboration as a viable and valuable, research strategy for the future.

Biography

Frank R. Baumgartner is the Richard J. Richardson Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He joined the department in 2009 as the first holder of the Richardson professorship. His work focuses mainly on public policy, agenda-setting, and interest groups in American and comparative politics and has appeared in such journals as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, Comparative Politics, the Journal of European Public Policy, and Legislative Studies Quarterly. He has also been recently involved in studies of race and criminal justice. He created the Policy Agendas Project together with Bryan D. Jones; which they both continue to direct, with John Wilkerson. It has since generated the Comparative Agendas Project, which is an international network. In 2019, Oxford University Press will publish Comparative Policy Agendas: Theory, Tools, Data (Frank R. Baumgartner, Christian Breunig, and Emiliano Grossman, eds.), an introduction and sourcebook for the Comparative Agendas Project.