Agendas and instability in American local politics: A study of the Austin City Council Agenda 1900–2020

Abstract The 1993 publication of Agendas and Instability in American Politics transformed the study of policymaking in American politics, by systematically tracing stability and change in issue attention over time. The underlying data collection effort is essential to understanding its importance; thousands of measures of the policy agenda were collected and content coded to examine trends in policy outputs from various American political institutions. In this study, we apply a similar coding scheme at the local level to study stability and change in policy agendas at the local level. Using a 120‐year sample of all items from city council meeting minutes in Austin, Texas, content coded to the subtopic level, we identify long‐term trends in the local policy agenda and explores how the local policy agenda is influenced by the national policy agenda, by local population growth and by reforms of local political institutions.