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The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) is an international research programme that studies agenda-setting and policy dynamics by developing systematic indicators of issue attention in a range of political systems and the EU. The project extends the coding techniques developed in the US Policy Agendas Project to compare issue attention and policy activities across time, issues, institutions and countries. The first section of this article reviews the theoretical and empirical foundations of the project. Focusing on existing and ongoing research, the second section shows the potential of the CAP for public policy and comparative politics. The conclusions illustrate the promises of the comparative study of policy agendas in Italy. Adapted from the source document.

This paper traces Finer's intellectual development, including a short period of Marxism, a thorough reading of Pareto, & an intensive dialogue with comparative politics scholars in the US. He criticized the black box model of systems theory as well as the evolutionary bias in comparative development studies. While his early work concerned GB, his role in heading two departments of politics made him rethink a general political science curriculum. He pioneered the study of the lobby in Anonymous Empire (1958) & of the military in politics in The Man on Horseback (1962). In his retirement, he wrote A History of Government from Earliest Times, published posthumously in three volumes (1997), leaving valuable testimonies about methods & concepts. Only a true erudite, fascinated by all aspects of government, could have engaged in such a venture. Finer was a teacher sans pareil of both the professional & the layman interested in the ubiquity of government & politics. 32 References. Adapted from the source document.

Research in comparative politics has shown a renewed interest in the relation between political parties and the state. However, we know comparatively little about patronage -- defined as the power of political parties to distribute public sector posts -- as a key dimension of the linkage between political parties and the state. This article, based on comparative empirical evidence on patterns of patronage in 15 European democracies, has two central goals. First, it seeks to empirically evaluate commonalities and differences among European democracies with respect to patronage and its pervasiveness, logic and mechanics. Second, it considers the new light that the empirical analysis sheds on the contemporary explanations of patronage. The empirical analysis suggests that it is the interaction of administrative legacy effects with patterns of party system consolidation and crisis that accounts for the differences in contemporary patronage practices. Adapted from the source document.

The history of the conceptualization & application of the notions of culture, political/civic culture, & social capital in politology, & comparative political science in particular, is traced, discussing: (1) treatments of the relationship between civic culture & democracy in classical works of sociology & political science (eg, Montesquieu, Guizot, Herder, or Tocqueville), (2) the pioneering study in Gabriel A. Almond & Sidney Verba's Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton U Press, 1963), (3) neglect of the notion of civic culture in the 1970s & 1980s, (4) civic culture as a dependent & independent variable, (5) J. Coleman's (1988) definition of social capital, (6) Robert D. Putnam's definition of social capital & its use in La tradizione civica nelle regioni italiane ([The Civic Tradition in Italian Regions] Milan: Mondadori, 1993) & Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), (7) the effectiveness of the concept of social capital as a descriptive-explanatory tool in comparative political science, & (8) the continued controversy & debate on this notion in contemporary politology. References. Z. Dubiel

Verba claims he owes his long & distinguished career in political science largely to a series of accidental events in his young days. He did not set out to follow a carefully planned career path. One project led to another: this is how he describes his involvement as a key player in the behavioral revolution in the fields of both comparative & American politics. However, on close inspection, several common threads emerge that have guided Verba throughout his professional life: concerns about equality, citizenship, the nature of the relationship of individuals to the state, & democracy. The normative concern is evident & deeply felt, although this does not prevent Verba from objectively weighing the evidence. His works are significant not only for the substantive importance of the questions addressed, but also for the methodological innovations. What truly sets Verba apart from his generation of equally accomplished scholars may be that at age 70, he continues to be actively engaged in research & to produce books & journal articles with substantive research findings. After receiving numerous awards for his lifetime contributions to the discipline, Verba remains an active, committed political scientist. 44 References. Adapted from the source document.

Comparative analysis of the representation of women in national parliaments around the world. Summary in English.

A review essay on books by (1) Carol L Bacchi, Women, Policy and Politics (London: Sage, 1999); (2) Lee Ann Banaszak, Karen Beckwith, Dieter Rucht [Eds], Women's Movements Facing the Reconfigured State (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2003); (3) Catherine Hoskyins, Integrating Gender: Women, Law and Politics in the European Union (London: Verso, 1996); (4) Amy G. Mazur, Theorizing Feminist Policy (Oxford: Oxford U Press, 2002); (5) Joyce Outshoorn & Johanna Kantola [Eds], Changing State Feminism (London: Palgrave, 2007); & (6) Dorothy McBride Stetson & Amy G. Mazur [Eds], Comparative State Feminism (Oxford, Oxford U Press, 1995). Tables, References.

This research examines the current institutional structures of the executive-legislative relationship in the EU from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. That is not just examining how the institutions are linked theoretically or even in the formal structural sense, but also their functional political and policy relationship in terms of what they actually do. The character and performance of the EU executive-legislative relationship is analyzed from a comparative perspective in light of the current reforms introduced both in the Lisbon Treaty and in the academic realm among scholars lobbying for institutional reform. The goal of the research is to achieve not just an empirically founded understanding of the current executive-legislative relationship in the EU, but also to obtain an empirical grounding for the current dialog regarding the need for institutional reform in the EU. The goal of this research is to build a bridge between the two parallel empirical and theoretical literatures regarding EU institutions that currently exist. Adapted from the source document.

Based on recent IPE contributions on three key themes in international politics (the relation between trade-technology & interstate conflicts, the link between multinationalization in production & world stability, & the political economy of democracy promotion in post-conflict countries), this essay calls the attention on the potential that IPE studies have for the analysis of complex processes (political & economic, with domestic, international & trans-national reach) across long time-spans. Empirical research on these topics has provided new ground to test & refine hypotheses from the three IPE orthodox Schools (Realism-Mercantilism, Liberalism & Marxism), pointing to the advantages of multivariate setups that treat both political & economic determinants of international outcomes as endogenous. Studies on the trade-war links have opened the way to analyses of how growth-inducing mechanisms in war economies may combine with the lasting effects of war-borne protectionist coalitions in producing differential outcomes, according to countries' resource endowments & level of development. Hypotheses on the peace-inducing features of multinationalized production appear in need of revision, especially when applied to the context of North-South relations, in which traditional dynamics identified in the FDI literature do not seem to obtain. Last, scholars interested in the political economy of post-war reconstruction could fruitfully borrow from the comparative literature on transitions, the economic contributions on development & the IR research on conflict, to provide new theoretical tools for the analysis of democracy promotion in post-conflict states. References. Adapted from the source document.