The Irish Policy Agendas Project is part of the established, world-class Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) network. CAP research projects aim to measure the allocation of attention to policy issues across multiple institutional, political, and societal agendas, and to use those data to understand policy and politics.

The first peer-reviewed articles from the Irish Policy Agendas Project have been published recently:

Green-Pedersen, C. and Little, C. 2022. The Issue Content of Party Politics in Ireland. A New Perspective on the Irish Party System and its Development. Irish Political Studies, online before print.

Green-Pedersen, C. & Little, C. 2023. Understanding the conflict of conflicts. Is left-right conflict a necessary condition for the development of new politics? Political Studies, online before print.

Little, C. 2023. The legislative agenda in Ireland, 1922-2021. Irish Political Studies, online before print.

These articles use data coded using the Irish Policy Agendas Project Codebook. v1.1 of the Codebook is available here. You can read a background note on the development of the codebook here.

The data are coded from party manifestos (1981-2020) and legislation (1922-2021).

For a data report on the party manifesto data, click here. If you wish to use the party manifesto data, contact Prof. Christoffer Green-Pedersen at cgp [at] ps.au.dk.

You can read about the coding of the legislative data here. These data will be made available shortly; in the meantime, please contact Dr. Conor Little at conor.little [at] ul.ie. Please cite the relevant articles in Irish Political Studies when using these data.

A new policy agendas project, Public Policy Agendas on a Shared Island (PPASI) has been awarded funding by the Irish Research Council under the Shared Island strand of the New Foundations 2022 scheme, supported by the Department of the Taoiseach’s Shared Island Initiative. It will run from December 2022 to September 2023.

The project aims to examine politics and policymaking on the island of Ireland by measuring the allocation of attention to policy issues in legislation, party manifestos, and in the shared institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

The PPASI project workshop takes place in Belfast (and online) on 9 and 10 February 2023. You can find the workshop programme here. The workshop on 9/10 February has been cancelled due to strike action in UK universities.

The project is led by Dr. Conor Little at the University of Limerick and partners include Dr. Michele Crepaz and Prof. Muiris MacCarthaigh (Queen’s University Belfast), Dr. Shaun Bevan (University of Edinburgh), Dr. Mary Murphy (University College Cork), Dr. Catherine Lynch (Houses of the Oireachtas Library and Research Service), and Prof. Christoffer Green-Pedersen (Aarhus University).

The IPAP Workshop took place online on 29 November 2021. It was hosted by the Department of Justice and it brought together researchers of Irish politics and public policy, researchers from the CAP network, and public sector practitioners. The workshop programme is available here.

The Irish Policy Agendas Project has received support from the Irish Research Council’s New Foundations scheme 2019 and 2022, the University of Limerick’s Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University.

We will add outputs to this site as the project develops. For more information, contact conor.little [at] ul.ie.