Local government operates close to home. From trash pickup to snow removal and emergency services, you find local government at almost every street corner. But does close proximity equate to better representation for and of constituents?
The U.S. Congress is notoriously out of step with the American population. Women comprise only 28% of Congress while making up more than half of the U.S. population (51%). Representation is also elusive for people of color, young people, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Historically, it has been difficult to analyze trends in descriptive representation like this at the local level. Sparse data existed on local elections and officials like mayors, city councilors, sheriffs, and school board members. However, in 2022, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner (Harvard Kennedy School), Diana Da In Lee (Columbia University), Yamil Velez (Columbia University), and Christopher Warshaw (Georgia Washington University) released a new, comprehensive database of about 78,000 candidates in 57,500 local electoral contests between 1989-2021. The novel dataset contains information on candidates, election results, and key demographics, including race and gender. Read more about the work in this paper.
To bring the dataset to life, the Local Elections Database Project team, a part of Harvard Kennedy School's class Programming and Data for Policymakers (DPI 691-M), is visualizing the representativeness of various electoral contests. We hope that the people engaged in making communities across the country more representative will find these displays illustrative and useful. If you would like to learn more about the database that inspired this project, you can visit the American Local Government Elections database.
This website is a work in progress. We are continuing to add visualizations and data breakdowns over time. The first area we targeted was gender representation. We encourage you to:
View the Data - Gender Representation
We owe our source data to the American Local Government Elections Database. If you would like to learn more about that database, you can access it online.
Visit the American Local Government Elections Database
Our team has compiled information about our project and our use of the American Local Government Elections Database in the "About the Data tab of this website.
Would you like to learn more about how we analyzed the data? You can check out our team's page on GitHub for that information.
Access Our Project Data and Documentation
Finally, if you would like to access the data we used directly, you can download the files.
Do you have feedback for this website? Share your comments here. We value input and hope to make this a better resource for advocates, researchers, and anyone interested in representation and democracy.