Our paper introducing the "American Local Government Elections Database" is online at Scientific Data. The data includes 78,000 candidates in 57,000 electoral contests in races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities and counties over the last three decades. - ThreadSky

chriswarshaw.bsky.social • 438 days ago

Our paper introducing the "American Local Government Elections Database" is online at Scientific Data. The data includes 78,000 candidates in 57,000 electoral contests in races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities and counties over the last three decades.

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jayulfelder.bsky.social•438 days ago

Thank you! What a terrific public good!

ylelkes.bsky.social•438 days ago

This is amazing service to the discipline. Thank you!

giocirco.bsky.social•438 days ago

Wow - this is wild. Thanks for sharing!

aeggers.bsky.social•436 days ago

This looks great. Do you record electoral rules in place, eg whether there is a majority runoff requirement? I couldn't get that from the writeup.

chriswarshaw.bsky.social•436 days ago

We don’t record much about the rules in this dataset. Only the number of winners that emerge from a contest (1 in FPTP systems obv). We tried to only record the final election for each constituency.

aeggers.bsky.social•436 days ago

Yeah I've found this challenging when researching effects of electoral systems. Many places have runoff systems and there was a good APSA paper in 2022 by Cerrone and McLintock that documents this for big cities but I think they had to go case by case

jacksantucci.bsky.social•392 days ago

The @mlatner.bsky.social -led project will produce some of said data.

chriswarshaw.bsky.social•436 days ago

I think a separate, but equally important, project would be to comprehensively record the rules for each election and local gov. I’ve done some of that for past projects, but haven’t tried to put it all in one place and ensure it’s comprehensive.

chriswarshaw.bsky.social•438 days ago

The database includes partisan and demographic information about candidates in these races as well as electoral outcomes. We hope that the data will facilitate a myriad of new research on representation and elections in local governments. We plan to continue to update it in the future.

chriswarshaw.bsky.social•438 days ago

In the paper, we provide an illustrative application focusing on descriptive representation in local governments, and the continuing under-representation of women and racial minorities at nearly all levels of government.

chriswarshaw.bsky.social•438 days ago

This paper is joint w/ @yamilrvelez.bsky.social, @jdbk.bsky.social, & Diana Da In Lee. We are grateful for feedback from many colleagues about this project, including @dthompson.bsky.social & many others. We also appreciate support from RSF, @mitelectionlab.bsky.social, & BU Initiative on Cities.

chriswarshaw.bsky.social•438 days ago

We are also grateful for many other scholars that have generously shared election data they collected, which we build upon in this study, including Fernando Ferreira, Joseph Gyourko, Elisabeth Gerber, Dan Hopkins, Dan Thompson, Carissa Byrne Hessick, Michael Zoorob, and Sam Krumholz.

chriswarshaw.bsky.social•438 days ago

Finally, we are grateful for the teams of amazing RAs at GW, MIT, and Harvard that played a key role in helping to collect the raw election data that underlies our study.

chriswarshaw.bsky.social•438 days ago

We'll continue to update and expand the database in the future. So please let us know if you find any bugs, or have any requests/ideas for additions to it.

heingoemans.bsky.social•438 days ago

Wow. Congratulations!

mullinmeg.bsky.social•438 days ago

Swoon. Thanks, y’all!

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