LocalView

Data science tools to study local politics and policy-making in the United States.


Download Codebook Paper


LocalView is a database co-created by Soubhik Barari and Tyler Simko to advance the study of local government in the United States.

It is the largest dataset of local government public meetings — the central policy-making process in American local government — as they are captured on video.

See, for example, below a meeting from Issaquah, Washington in 2014 addressing climate change.

This project is currently under development. If you are interested in partnerships or learning more, please contact Soubhik Barari (sbarari@g.harvard.edu) or Tyler Simko (tsimko@g.harvard.edu).

Summary

At present, the database covers 139,616 videos of public meetings 1,012 places and 2,861 distinct governments across the United States between 2006-2022. The map below provides a summary of the geographic coverage in the sample.


Map

LocalView is continuously collected, processed, and publicly for analysis through an automated pipeline described below.

Pipeline

Below are a few tables that summarise the current composition of the database**.

Table 1. LocalView Meetings By Type of Channel
Channels
Videos
Host Type: N % N %
Official Govt 506 54.58% 79,078 56.64%
Media 199 21.47% 35,396 25.35%
Independent 117 12.62% 9,685 6.94%
Unknown 105 11.33% 15,457 11.07%
Table 2. LocalView Meetings By Type of Government
Channels
Videos
Government Type: N % N %
Municipal Council 802 29.10% 85,646 61.34%
Municipal Committee 276 10.01% 10,626 7.61%
Planning/Zoning Board/Commission 264 9.58% 5,757 4.12%
School Board 173 6.28% 5,320 3.81%
Other Board 246 8.93% 4,640 3.32%
County Commission 113 4.10% 4,564 3.27%
County Board 81 2.94% 4,291 3.07%
Board Of Selectmen 35 1.27% 3,125 2.24%
Village Board 40 1.45% 2,854 2.04%
Board Of Commissioners 134 4.86% 2,229 1.60%
Board Of Education 103 3.74% 2,155 1.54%
Board Of Aldermen 24 0.87% 1,947 1.39%
County Committee 35 1.27% 994 0.71%
Town Board 29 1.05% 910 0.65%
Board Of Trustees 43 1.56% 852 0.61%
Board Of Health 70 2.54% 738 0.53%
Board Of Supervisors 13 0.47% 556 0.40%
Parks/Rec Board/Commission 51 1.85% 408 0.29%
Special Commission 11 0.40% 129 0.09%
Development Corporation 1 0.04% 82 0.06%
Housing Authority 8 0.29% 32 0.02%
City Commission 2 0.07% 4 0.00%
Unknown 202 7.33% 1,757 1.26%
Table 3. LocalView Meetings By State
Channels
Videos
State: N % N %
Alabama 32 3.43% 4,280 3.07%
Alaska 1 0.11% 112 0.08%
Arizona 16 1.71% 2,469 1.77%
Arkansas 12 1.29% 846 0.61%
California 78 8.36% 19,069 13.66%
Colorado 18 1.93% 1,589 1.14%
Connecticut 5 0.54% 512 0.37%
Florida 8 0.86% 904 0.65%
Georgia 10 1.07% 1,021 0.73%
Idaho 4 0.43% 905 0.65%
Illinois 49 5.25% 7,076 5.07%
Indiana 5 0.54% 776 0.56%
Iowa 5 0.54% 1,282 0.92%
Kansas 2 0.21% 330 0.24%
Kentucky 3 0.32% 296 0.21%
Louisiana 2 0.21% 41 0.03%
Maine 5 0.54% 691 0.49%
Maryland 1 0.11% 147 0.11%
Massachusetts 16 1.71% 6,480 4.64%
Michigan 47 5.04% 6,475 4.64%
Minnesota 49 5.25% 5,942 4.26%
Mississippi 7 0.75% 923 0.66%
Missouri 40 4.29% 4,163 2.98%
Montana 6 0.64% 266 0.19%
Nebraska 10 1.07% 1,964 1.41%
Nevada 3 0.32% 340 0.24%
New Hampshire 3 0.32% 1,771 1.27%
New Jersey 48 5.14% 5,333 3.82%
New Mexico 5 0.54% 777 0.56%
New York 24 2.57% 3,678 2.63%
North Carolina 51 5.47% 6,982 5.00%
North Dakota 1 0.11% 5 0.00%
Ohio 73 7.82% 7,574 5.43%
Oklahoma 21 2.25% 3,015 2.16%
Oregon 21 2.25% 4,842 3.47%
Pennsylvania 41 4.39% 3,478 2.49%
Rhode Island 3 0.32% 379 0.27%
South Carolina 21 2.25% 1,657 1.19%
South Dakota 12 1.29% 5,888 4.22%
Tennessee 20 2.14% 4,443 3.18%
Texas 63 6.75% 6,710 4.81%
Utah 21 2.25% 2,531 1.81%
Vermont 2 0.21% 1,264 0.91%
Virginia 23 2.47% 2,816 2.02%
Washington 19 2.04% 3,016 2.16%
West Virginia 5 0.54% 173 0.12%
Wisconsin 19 2.04% 3,770 2.70%
Wyoming 3 0.32% 610 0.44%
**LocalView has meeting data for over 1,000 cities in the United States, but many cities do not post records of their meeting videos on YouTube. In particular, several large cities that researchers may be interested in such as New York City, host meeting videos on their own private paid services. For example, New York City hosts meeting videos here. We hope to integrate these sources into a future release of LocalView, but for now rely on YouTube for our video source.

Download

The LocalView dataset is hosted on Harvard Dataverse along with an accompanying codebook.

From the repository, you can download it in a number of formats depending on your needs including:

Option 1: Download meetings manually

Step 1. Go to doi.org/10.7910/DVN/NJTBEM.

Step 2. Either download the individual subset and format of meetings ( meetings.<subset>.<format> ) that you would like or download the entire repository as a single .zip file (not recommended due to the size).

Option 2: Download meetings using R

Step 1. Make an account on Harvard Dataverse. Log in and retrieve (or re-generate) your API Token.

Step 2. Install the dataverse package on R.

remotes::install_github("iqss/dataverse-client-r")

Step 3. Load the package in R and set the home server and your API token.

library(dataverse)

Sys.setenv("DATAVERSE_SERVER" = "https://dataverse.harvard.edu",
           "DATAVERSE_KEY" = "<my token>")

Step 4. Retrieve the particular slices of data you would like to work with (see package tutorials):

meetings.2016 <- get_dataframe_by_name(filename = "meetings.2016.rds",
                                       dataset = "10.7910/DVN/NJTBEM")

Option 3: Download meetings using Python

Step 1. Make an account on Harvard Dataverse. Log in and retrieve (or re-generate) your API Token.

Step 2. Install the pyDataverse package on Python.

pip3 install pyDataverse

Step 3. Load the package in Python and set the home server and your API token.

from pyDataverse.api import NativeApi

api = NativeApi("https://dataverse.harvard.edu", "<my token>")

Step 4. Download the particular slices of data you would like to work with (see package tutorials):

data_api = DataAccessApi('https://dataverse.harvard.edu/')

localview = api.get_dataset("doi:10.7910/DVN/NJTBEM")

data_api.get_datafile(file_id)

localview_files = localview.json()['data']['latestVersion']['files']

meetings_2016 = data_api.get_datafile("meetings.2016.csv")

with open("meetings.2016.csv.zip", "wb") as f:
  f.write(response.content)

Search

Coming Soon!