Sixth CAP Conference, Antwerp, 2013
This year the annual CAP conference took place in Antwerp from 27th to 29th June, hosting a higher number of panels and papers compared to its previous editions. The international collaboration includes teams of over 15 countries in the world, among which Canada, Germany, the US, Spain, Australia, and Great Britain to name a few. This year the community welcomed the start of new country projects in Turkey and Russia. The papers featured at the conference covered a wide array of topics within the shared interest in agenda setting: from new theoretical and methodological advances to many empirical investigations of the nature of political institutions and attention dynamics in policy areas. The two-day event started with an opening lecture by Chris Wlezien, a leading scholar on political responsiveness, and was closed after 13 sessions of intensive workshops.
Members of the EU Agendas team got traditionally involved in the event, moderating workshops and presenting papers within both the EU agendas framework and some of the respective national projects. Arco Timmermans and Anne Rasmussen chaired two panels on policy processes and institutions. Arco Timmermans also presented a paper co-authored with MI fellow Gerard Breeman on the policy agenda management in coalition governments in the Netherlands. The analysis shows that correspondence between coalition agreements and annual Queen’s speeches varies substantially over the past 40 years. Petya Alexandrova presented the theoretical basis for her dissertation on issue dynamics on the European Council agenda. The project proposes a new concept of policy compounds, which denotes substantive associations between issues in policy making, and aims to develop a better understanding of how these policy compounds emerge. Leticia Elias discussed an approach to studying organised crime as a ‘travelling issue’ between the agendas of the European Council and the European Commission. Marcello Carammia presented his enquiry on coalition politics in Italy, co-authored with Enrico Borghetto from Nova University Lisbon. Their research addresses questions pertaining to the capacity and power of different coalition parties to influence the policy agenda of the government.
Members of the EU Agendas team got traditionally involved in the event, moderating workshops and presenting papers within both the EU agendas framework and some of the respective national projects. Arco Timmermans and Anne Rasmussen chaired two panels on policy processes and institutions. Arco Timmermans also presented a paper co-authored with MI fellow Gerard Breeman on the policy agenda management in coalition governments in the Netherlands. The analysis shows that correspondence between coalition agreements and annual Queen’s speeches varies substantially over the past 40 years. Petya Alexandrova presented the theoretical basis for her dissertation on issue dynamics on the European Council agenda. The project proposes a new concept of policy compounds, which denotes substantive associations between issues in policy making, and aims to develop a better understanding of how these policy compounds emerge. Leticia Elias discussed an approach to studying organised crime as a ‘travelling issue’ between the agendas of the European Council and the European Commission. Marcello Carammia presented his enquiry on coalition politics in Italy, co-authored with Enrico Borghetto from Nova University Lisbon. Their research addresses questions pertaining to the capacity and power of different coalition parties to influence the policy agenda of the government.