LocalView Public Meetings Database

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 existing dataset of local government public meetings— the central policy-making process in American local government — as they are captured on video. To get started, select the file(s) that you'd like for your use case based on the year that the meeting took place. Note: we are no longer supporting file formats other than .parquet for space considerations. For potential use cases or further guidance on downloading the data in bulk, visit the companion website: localview.net. Change Log Scraping, parsing, identifying, and merging together meetings involves a large number of non-trivial decisions, many of which need to be adjusted over time particularly as the YouTube API changes. As such, when such decisions notably deviate from process or the outputs documented in the first version of this database, it will be logged here. Version 2.0 (2023-10) Data updated up until September 2023. ~10,000 new videos added, all belonging to existing channels in database. Change in data format: channelType column changed to channel_type. ST_FIPS correctly padded to be 7 characters (2 digit state code + 5 digit place FIPS code). videos with no caption available from YouTube are explicitly marked as “” in caption_text. caption_text_cleaned is actually consistently cleaned (previously stray timestamps/pause markers in some entries). acs_2018_* columns now prefixed as acs_18. additional ACS variables now available for each place: acs_18_median_gross_rent: Median gross rent in FIPS place. acs_18_median_hh_inc: Median household income in FIPS place. acs_18_median_age: Median age in FIPS place. acs_18_amind: American Indian population in FIPS place. acs_18_asian: Asian population in FIPS place. acs_18_nhapi: Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander population in FIPS place. census_2015_* columns removed for redundancy. to avoid confusion and possible conflicts, .json and .csv file formats eliminated in favor of .parquet format. municipal voteshare (_dem2pv) variables have been removed from the public use files for a number of reasons: (1) high degree of missingness, (2) no columns estimates available, (3) potential sensitivity The matching process of videos to ST-FIPS and government types is as follows: videos are matched to channels’ previous ST-FIPS codes and/or government types if there is an umambiguous match, otherwise a (1) series of regex matches with video title/description are used to attempt to match video to the government and (2) state/place names are extracted from each video’s title/description/caption and used to match to an ST-FIPS entity if an unambiguous match; only identified videos are then uploaded to the database. to identify the date of the meeting that the video captures, we first try to extract the date from the title, otherwise we try to extract the date from the description, otherwise it is discarded. Version 1.0 (2023-02) See publication for full details on methodology choices for the Version 1.0 database.