LocalView, a database of public meetings for the study of local politics and policy-making in the United States

Abstract

Despite the fundamental importance of American local governments for service provision in areas like education and public health, local policy-making remains difficult and expensive to study at scale due to a lack of centralized data. This article introduces LocalView, the largest existing dataset of real-time local government public meetings–the central policy-making process in local government. In sum, the dataset currently covers 139,616 videos and their corresponding textual and audio transcripts of local government meetings publicly uploaded to YouTube–the world’s largest public video-sharing website–from 1,012 places and 2,861 distinct governments across the United States between 2006–2022. The data are processed, downloaded, cleaned, and publicly disseminated (at localview.net) for analysis across places and over time. We validate this dataset using a variety of methods and demonstrate how it can be used to map local governments’ attention to policy areas of interest. Finally, we discuss how LocalView may be used by journalists, academics, and other users for understanding how local communities deliberate crucial policy questions on topics including climate change, public health, and immigration.

Police Shooting Statistics and Public Support for Police Reforms

“…Amid nationalization, localities still produce policies independent of national politics on a number of issues. Locally, there is "a variety of political issues with disparate spatial impacts, issues that have the potential to give rise to distinctive, localized political decisions" ( 14) and local political agendas and decision-making processes (Barari and Simko, 2021). The issue of police shootings is one of them.…”

When Do Local Interest Groups Participate in the Housing Entitlement Process?

“…1 1 This tension between facilitating new construction and competing for favorable contracts has even caused a major cleavage within the construction labor movement regarding whether to support regulatory streamlining reform to increase the housing supply or maintain the status quo to maximize unions' political leverage over individual Our analysis focuses on the behavior of construction unions, a well-organized group with clear, transparent goals: to secure favorable employment contracts for their members. As our dependent variable, we have generated a measure of this group's participation in the regulatory process using LocalView (Barari and Simko 2023), a database of public comment in local government meetings.…”

“…To code this, we rely on LocalView(Barari and Simko 2023), the largest database of transcripts from local meetings in municipalities across the United States. The LocalView database includes transcripts from all local meetings from 2006 to the present that have been uploaded to YouTube: to date, 78,118 city council and planning board meetings across 798 municipalities.…”

“…For more detail on this sample of municipalities, seeBarari and Simko (2023).3 See Figure A-1 for a distribution of the number of minutes per city.…”

Lifestyle versus social determinants of health in the Dutch parliament: An automated analysis of debate transcripts

“…Third, data extracted from transcripts of political debates allows differentiation across political ideologies, as we can assign contributions to political parties. With the release of ever larger databases of political debate transcripts ( Barari & Simko, 2023 ), these advantages may prove increasingly impactful in health policy research. The approach has downsides as well.…”