This weekend at APSA, Bryan Jones accepted the Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba award for best dataset on behalf of Comparative Agendas Project for its important contribution to comparative politics. The Hungarian CAP team was represented by its research director, Miklós Sebők.

Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, committee chair, wrote:

"The committee is pleased to award the Lijphart/Przeworski/Verba Dataset Award to the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP), for this important contribution to the field of comparative politics. The CAP stems from pioneering work by Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner on policy agendas in the United States and represents a global collaboration that rests on a common, harmonized codebook and approach by which team members use various inputs to code policy priorities, discussion, efforts, and outcomes. The project’s website offers documentation, an interactive data query tool, and data from over two dozen political systems. CAP data are referenced and analyzed in many hundreds of manuscripts found in Google Scholar, and CAP datasets have been downloaded more than 12,000 times in the last four years. Among other factors, the committee had praise for the historical scope of the project (e.g., data on UK agendas back to 1911).The committee was impressed by the project’s open and inclusive spirit, the latter evidenced by the project’s extensive network of collaborators and various activities that bring together a diverse set of researchers using the CAP data. The extensive scope of the project and its expansive non-hierarchical organizational structure make it a challenge to maintain quality and coherence, yet the project’s collaborators have been quite successful in this regard. Owing to their Herculean efforts, their due diligence, and their commitment to data access and transparency, the project has left an indelible mark on the field of comparative politics that will continue to grow in the years to come."