LocalView

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

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.

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

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:

.rds for R users
.dta for Stata users (not recommended due to how STATA truncates text values)
.parquet for more advanced users who care about efficiency
.json or .csv for everyone else

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)

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