Data Science Brown Bag series: Measuring Conflict in Local Politics Using 100,000 Videos of US School Board Meetings

Abstract by the speaker:

Many of the most tangible and immediate political conflicts occur at the local level. Yet, it often remains difficult to gather large-scale evidence on how, why, and where conflict occurs in local governments due to a lack of centralized data. In this paper, we present a new dataset of nearly 100,000 videos of US school board meetings, and a new measure of local political conflict. We use and validate this new approach using sentiment analysis and structural topic modeling. We then document consistent results: conflict in school board meetings broadly occurs at some point for most school boards, but the most intense conflicts are concentrated in small numbers of districts; this conflict often centers cultural issues like racial diversity and gender identity. We then show that conflict, particularly cultural conflict, is most likely to occur in larger school districts in cities and suburbs, in places with more white students, and in places with more political competition.

About the speaker:

Tyler Simko is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton, soon-to-be Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan, specializing in US state and local politics, policy design, and inequality. He is also the co-creator of LocalView, a groundbreaking local government meeting database, and Co-PI of the ALARM Project on political geography, their cutting-edge work blends computational social science and policy impact, with media features in The Washington Post and more.

Bring your own lunch bag! Light pastries and drinks will be available in case you forget to bring it. 

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The Data Science Brown Bag Series is an informal and interactive gathering where participants bring their own brown bag lunch and engage in discussions on research and insights the field of data and computational social science (light pastries and drinks will be available if you forget your lunch bag!). 

The series provides a platform for data enthusiasts, researchers, and practitioners to share their experiences, best practices, and emerging methodologies and research in using data science to analyze and understand social and political phenomena. The brown bag talk series is for anyone interested in data science and social science to network, learn, and share ideas in a casual and friendly setting.