Policy Dynamics in Democratic Spain

Abstract

In this book, we explain how and why policy issues get onto the political agenda. We make both theoretical and empirical contributions to the analysis of policy dynamics and provide a new set of tools for qualitative and quantitative studies of Spanish politics and public policy throughout the period of democratic governance. To do that we follow the policy-dynamics approach. This means that we focus not only on policy preferences and institutional factors, as most comparative analysis does, but also on flows of information, or attention. Our goal is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the patterns of issue prioritization on the agendas of the Spanish government, parliament, and media. We want to go beyond case studies, to cover a time span of more than three decades, and to rely on systematic quantitative indicators for our conclusions. We consider the empirical scope of what we have undertaken to be one of our major contributions to existing research. Of course, we have theoretical and substantive conclusions that go beyond only these methodological points.