CPPA faculty associate Charli Carpenter (political science), CPPA alumna Anna Tomaskovic-Devey ’10, and Kyle Brownlie (PhD candidate, political science) are co-authors of a report about why transnational advocacy networks take up particular issues and not others.
The report, Agenda-Setting in Transnational Networks: Findings from Consultations with Human Security Practitioners, is based on research supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation and conducted partly during Tomaskovic-Devey’s tenure as a graduate assistant for the project.
The research used focus groups with practitioners at 39 human security organizations, along with computer-assisted analysis provided by the UMass Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) coding lab, to determine four general factors influencing the likelihood that a particular issue will receive attention: 1) the nature of the issue, 2) the attributes of the actors involved, 3) the broader political context, and 4) the structural relationships within advocacy networks.
According to the authors, the findings in the report have important implications for all “issue entrepreneurs” working for social change, including those outside of the human rights arena.
Carpenter teaches a CPPA course on global agenda-setting, which analyzes politics in the human security area and is built around the model Carpenter developed through her NSF-funded study on transnational networks. As part of the course, CPPA students have presented findings from their research projects to relevant practitioners at nonprofits in Washington, D.C.
The full report is available here, and additional information is available at the project’s website.