Over 700 policies are tracked with their year of first adoption across all fifty U.S. states, with adoption dates ranging from 1691 to 2017. Policies are adopted by an average of 25 states, with adoption counts ranging from 1 to 50. The data were assembled by Frederick J. Boehmke at the University of Iowa from academic publications and policy advocacy groups, and policies are coded according to the Policy Agendas Project topic codes.
Use Cases
- Modeling policy diffusion patterns based on state adoption years.
- Analyzing the spread of specific policy topics across states over time.
- Identifying early-adopter and late-adopter states for policy innovation studies.
- Correlating policy adoption timelines with other state-level socioeconomic factors.
Strengths
- Covers over 700 distinct policies, providing a broad scope for analysis.
- Includes data for all fifty U.S. states, ensuring complete geographic coverage.
- Spans a long temporal range from 1691 to 2017, enabling historical studies.
- Policies are coded with a standardized topic scheme from the Policy Agendas Project.
Limitations
- Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
- Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.
- Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale ML.
Provenance
- Source
- University of Iowa (Frederick J. Boehmke)
- Collection Method
- Assembled from academic publications and policy advocacy/information groups.
- Time Range
- 1691 to 2017
- Geography
- All fifty U.S. states