The Irish Policy Agendas Project and the Public Policy Agendas on a Shared Island project are part of the established, world-class Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) network. CAP research aims 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.

PPASI Workshop: The Public Policy Agendas on a Shared Island (PPASI) workshop will take place in Queen’s University Belfast on 8 and 9 June 2023. It is an open workshop and will be accessible online. The workshop programme is available here.

The PPASI project is funded by the Irish Research Council’s New Foundations scheme and the workshop is also supported by the Political Studies Association of Ireland (PSAI) and the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics (HAPP) at Queen’s University Belfast.

The PPASI 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 shared institutions of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

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).

Contact conor.little@ul.ie if you wish to be added to the PPASI mailing list.

Call for papers for the Political Studies Association of Ireland (PSAI) Annual Conference, Queen’s University Belfast, 20-22 October 2023.

With the support of the Public Policy Specialist Group of the PSAI, the Irish Policy Agendas Project plans to organise a panel focusing on agenda-setting and policy agendas at the PSAI Annual Conference in Belfast in October. We welcome policy agendas research focused on Ireland, Northern Ireland and other contexts. If you would like to submit a paper proposal for this panel, please contact the Co-Convenors of the Public Policy Specialist Group Dr. Conor Little (conor.little@ul.ie) and Prof. Muiris MacCarthaigh (m.maccarthaigh@qub.ac.uk). 

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

Little, C. 2023. The legislative agenda in Ireland, 1922-2021. Irish Political Studies 38 (1): 7-34.

Green-Pedersen, C. and Little, C. 2023. The Issue Content of Party Politics in Ireland. A New Perspective on the Irish Party System and its Development. Irish Political Studies 38 (1): 35-59.

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.

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.

The Irish Policy Agendas Project 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 and the Public Policy Agendas on a Shared Island project have 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.

For more information, contact conor.little [at] ul.ie.