The Agendas France Project started with the building of a first dataset gathering all the statutes promulgated in France. This task was done by Sylvain Brouard with the help of several research assistants (Hanane Harrath, Angéline Escafré-Dublet, Julien Navarro).

Laws are key outputs of a political system. If policy analysis may not be limited to the study of statutes, avoiding it would be problematic. Furthermore, legislative production is an important indicator of the issue attention and dynamics as well as their role in political competititon. In fact enacting laws is not only a mean to try to solve problems but also, perhaps first of all, a way to signal attention to these problems. Legislating underscores political priorities of a governing majority. In this perspective and according to the philosophy of the Comparative Agendas Project, each promulgated law is coded according to its policy content.

In 2005 at the very beginning of the project as well as today, there was not any available exhaustive databases. France has trailed behind most of the Western countries regarding databases in political science. Thus, in order to cope with the lack of systematic data about the legislative process, the law dataset « LOIS » goes beyond the topics code. Numerous other variables are coded in the dataset regarding for example the use of restrictive procedures (49.3, urgency…), the legislative process (referendum, commission mixte paritaire…) and the type of laws (organic law, constitutional law…). The dataset also includes a variable that identifies the « important » laws.

The file « LOIS » is the first exhaustive dataset in France including all laws promulgated between the 1st Junuary 1979 and the 31st December 2009. Currently under a systematic check-up, the dataset will be soon available on the Agendas France website. The dataset will be regularly updated and completed. Our aim is to gather the whole set of laws promulgated since the beginning of the Fifth Republic.