LocalView: Studying Urban Policymaking in American Cities

The vast majority of decisions on urban politics in the United States are made in local public government meetings, but the decentralized nature of local governments in our federal system makes it difficult to collect data on these meetings and study them at scale. We are collecting the first large scale dataset of local government meetings in the United States, LocalView, for academic and public use. Our aims for LocalView are to (1) continue building a public dataset for scholars to use for the interdisciplinary study of US urban policymaking and (2) create an interactive web portal to interact and engage with the meeting data for academics, journalists, activists, and the general public. Our first version of the dataset was recently published in Nature: Scientific Data as an academic article and has drawn wide attention from the academy and beyond. For example, at the time of writing, Nature reports that LocalView is in the “98th percentile (ranked 3rd) of the 159 tracked articles of a similar age in Scientific Data,” which speaks to its wide interest for readers of an interdisciplinary journal. We hope to use HMUI funding to expand LocalView to other types of local governments, most notably school boards, and to improve the data visualization and interactive sections of our public-facing website for the project, localview.net.

Researchers: Soubhik Barari and Tyler Simko