The Promise of Text, Audio, and Video Data for the Study of US Local Politics and Federalism.

This article focuses on the LocalView project, which creates the largest existing database of U.S. local government meeting transcripts, audio, and video to advance the empirical study of local policymaking and federalism. It highlights the limitations of traditional meeting minutes—such as lack of centralization, inconsistent formats, and summarization—and argues that meeting videos and their transcripts offer richer, standardized data that enable new research on local governance and intergovernmental relations. Using LocalView data, the authors demonstrate that nationally salient partisan language is common in local government meetings, especially in larger cities, and that the partisan slant of this language correlates with local voting patterns. The article underscores the potential of non-tabular data sources to transform the study of local politics by allowing scholars to explore deliberation, responsiveness, and the dynamics between local, state, and federal governments.