Local Politics Lab
The partisanship of mayors has no detectable effect on police spending, police employment, crime, or arrests
Science Advances
Local Politics Lab
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Researching local policy, public opinion, and how citizens hold elected officials accountable
Led by faculty director Justin de Benedictis-Kessner, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Local Politics Lab studies some of the most important policy areas for local governments, including housing, transportation, policing, and economic development.
The lab also examines how citizens hold elected officials accountable, how representation translates the public’s interests into policy via elections, and how people’s policy opinions are formed and swayed.
Interested in the lab? Contact us to see how you can get involved.
Affiliates
Assistant Clinical Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Assistant Professor of Political Science, George Washington University
Kirkland & Ellis Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
Professor of Political Science, George Washington University
PhD candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University
PhD candidate, Department of Political Science, University of California, San Diego
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Harvard Kennedy School
PhD candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University
American Local Elections Database
TrueViews
Violence Against Women Mayors Research
American Local Elections Database
New Research
American Local Elections Database
The study of urban and local politics in the United States has long been hindered by a lack of centralized sources of election data. We introduce a new database of about 78,000 candidates in 57,000 electoral contests that encompasses races for seven distinct local political offices in most medium and large cities and counties in the U.S. over the last three decades. This is the most comprehensive publicly-available source of information on local elections across the country. We provide partisan and demographic information about candidates in these races as well as electoral outcomes. This new database will facilitate a myriad of new research on representation and elections in local governments.
TrueViews
Hyperlocal Data on U.S. Public Opinion
TrueViews
A collaboration between the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, Professor Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos at Harvard Law School, and Professor Christopher S. Warshaw at George Washington University, TrueViews enables elected officials, candidates, journalists, and others to acquire policy-specific information about public opinion at the subnational level—instantly.
Many elected officials lack information about their constituents’ policy preferences. TrueViews aims to change that by presenting freely downloadable public opinion data on dozens of issue areas, both contemporaneously and historically, within multiple geographic levels, including congressional districts, state legislative districts, counties, and municipalities.
Violence Against Women Mayors Research
Ongoing research
Politics Under Fire: Women Mayors’ Strategies Against Political Violence
Women in local elective offices in the U.S. are targeted with threats and harassment 3.4 times more than men, according to data from the Bridging Divides Initiative at Princeton University. To document and understand this violence, Justin de Benedictis-Kessner and Yanilda González, Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, along with a larger group of scholars supported by the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, are pursuing original research to shed new light on the nature and extent of the problem, the conditions and factors fueling it, the impact of the problem on aspirants to public office, and, ultimately, the interventions that can mitigate or reduce this violence.
