Setting the Alcohol-control Agenda: Popular Attitudes and Legislative Responses Toward Alcohol Control and Prohibition in the United States, 1890-1950

These datasets were constructed to discern whether the dramatic policy punctuations associated with the Eighteenth and Twenty-First Amendments to the United States Constitution, which instituted and repealed, respectively, the policy of alcohol prohibition, could best be accounted for through the use of punctuated equilibrium theory. To that end, two datasets were constructed. The first attempts to gauge public attitudes toward alcohol control and prohibition, as well as its place on the public agenda, through a coding of all entries related to alcohol control and prohibition in the READER'S GUIDE TO PERIODICAL LITERATURE, from 1890 through 1950, using a simplified version of the general coding protocols of the Policy Agendas Project (PAP). The second dataset seeks to gauge legislative activity and the issues placed on the legislative agenda through a similar coding of the hearings sections in the Congressional Information Service's CIS ANNUAL: ABSTRACTS OF CONGRESSIONAL PUBLICATIONS AND LEGISLATIVE HISTORY CITATIONS for the same time period.