On September 28th Frank Baumgartner, professor of the University of North Carolina visited the Hungarian Research Team of the Comparative Agendas Project (http://www.cap.tk.mta.hu) hosted by the Centre for Social Sciences of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His talk was titled "The Comparative Agendas Project: Building a Community of Scholars Assessing Links between Politics and Policy". 

Baumgartner is an internationally recognized leader in the field of public policy research. He co-founded the international network of the Comparative Agendas Project (http://www.comparativeagendas.net – CAP) with Bryan Jones, which now includes many European and Asian country-projects besides the original project in the U.S. The professor spoke about, inter alia, the necessity of using common standards and country-specific indicators in each participating country in building comparable datasets. Baumgartner highlighted the cooperation of these countries as the main purpose of CAP. His talk was followed by a presentation by the Hungarian team which covered new datasets and recent publications. The discussion resulted in concrete plans for MTA TK to host in Budapest the annual meeting of CAP in the near future.