Rice’s Local Elections in America Project joins Kinder Institute for Urban Research

New center will expand data collection, help foster research to strengthen local democracy

Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research created a new center this month to house the Local Elections in America Project. Supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the center will promote greater knowledge and understanding of local elections in the United States, especially with regard to voter behavior and how electoral behavior affects local government outcomes.

Previously housed in Rice’s Department of Political Science, the Local Elections in America Project created the first and only comprehensive database of local elections in the U.S. Using that database and software, the new center is intended to serve as the leading national source for data, research and education about local elections in America, said Melissa Marschall, the co-principal investigator of the Local Elections in America Project and a professor of political science at Rice.

At the Kinder Institute, the project will be better positioned to expand its database, disseminate research further, connect a much broader group of researchers and stakeholders and ultimately advance the understanding of local elections and the solutions that hold the greatest promise to increase voter turnout and revive local democracy in the U.S., Marschall said.

The Local Elections in America Project database currently includes hundreds of thousands of election results and candidates from county, municipal, school-board and special-district races across 22 states. The center will work toward improving the project’s software and data collection strategy to gather results from the remaining states and counties. Data collection will be expanded to include information such as candidates’ race, ethnicity and gender as well as campaign platforms and finance.

The center will conduct a broad range of research on local elections and support more studies by spreading and publicizing the database widely. In particular, it will explore limited voter turnout, low numbers of candidates and the noncompetitive nature of local elections in certain jurisdictions, as well as ways to better engage citizens in civic life. The center will also disseminate research results extensively to foster policy change around the nation in the area of local elections.

“In the United States, local governments make up over 99 percent of all governments, and every year hundreds of thousands of candidates run for local office,” Marschall said. “The project is the only enterprise that systematically collects and compiles data on these elections. Knight Foundation support and the project’s new home at the Kinder Institute will provide for the expansion of the current database and engagement in a full-scale effort to use the database and research results to understand the process and outcomes of local elections in the U.S.”

Marschall noted that with more empirically based evidence, policymakers and other stakeholders can go much further in identifying how to field more and better candidates, provide more information for voters about local candidates and local politics, stimulate interest in local campaigns, make elections more efficient and effective and ultimately create more participatory and vibrant local communities and healthier democracy in the nation’s cities and towns.

“In order to make cities better, it’s vital to understand local elections,” said Bill Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute. “I’m thrilled that Melissa Marschall has chosen to bring this very powerful database to the Kinder Institute. Urban experts across the country will benefit from knowing more about the patterns in local elections.”

The Kinder Institute is currently broadening its focus to include several new program areas that align with local elections research efforts, including urban disparities, urban and metropolitan governance and urban placemaking. More information on the institute is available at http://kinder.rice.edu/.

The Local Elections in America Project was created in 2010 by Marschall and co-principal investigator Paru Shah of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; initial support was provided by the National Science Foundation, Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute for Information Technology and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.