Crowdsourcing Reliable Local Data

Abstract

The adage “All politics is local” in the United States is largely true. Of the United States’ 90,106 governments, 99.9% are local governments. Despite variations in institutional features, descriptive representation, and policy-making power, political scientists have been slow to take advantage of these variations. One obstacle is that comprehensive data on local politics is often extremely difficult to obtain; as a result, data is unavailable or costly, hard to replicate, and rarely updated. We provide an alternative: crowdsourcing this data. We demonstrate and validate crowdsourcing data on local politics using two different data collection projects. We evaluate different measures of consensus across coders and validate the crowd’s work against elite and professional datasets. In doing so, we show that crowdsourced data is both highly accurate and easy to use. In doing so, we demonstrate that nonexperts can be used to collect, validate, or update local data.

COVID-19 Government Response Event Dataset (CoronaNet v.1.0)

“…Large social scientific datasets typically rely on experts, coders or crowd-sourcing to input data. The literature has shown that common coding tasks can be completed via crowd-sourcing 83,84 , but that there are also limitations to the wisdom of crowds when specific contextual or subject knowledge is required 85,86 . To address these trade-offs, we decided to train current RAs to code our entries, leveraging the benefits of widespread recruitment and a diverse pool of country-specific knowledge from across the globe.…”

Are You Picking Up What I Am Laying Down? Ideology in Low-Information Elections

“…Assessing voting behavior in local elections provides a specific set of methodological challenges (Sumner, Farris, and Holman 2019). To understand how candidates and groups behaved in the election, we use data on candidate behavior, endorsements, local media coverage, and voter attitudes via focus groups and surveys.…”

“…Finally, we also add to the scholarship on how ideology works in low-information environments where partisanship is unavailable as an easy cue to determine ideological placement of candidates. In a context where "everyday is election day in America" (Sumner, Farris, and Holman 2019), understanding how voters behave in these elections helps illuminate how voters behave in the majority of elections.…”

Women's Municipal Electoral Performance: An Introduction to the Canadian Municipal Elections Database

“…By clarifying the value of accessible election results data, we hope to persuade municipal officials, provincial governments and municipal associations to make election results available in complete and downloadable formats, thus reducing the need for manual data entry and enabling more widespread use of the data. We also hope that the CMED will inspire municipal archivists to make election results publicly available online, reducing the need for costly trips to municipal archives and enabling innovative digitization efforts using crowd-sourcing methods (Sumner et al, 2020) or university-based research teams.…”