Participation and Representation in Local Government Speech
Local government meetings are the most common formal channel through which residents speak directly with elected officials, contest policies, and shape local agendas. However, data constraints typically limit the empirical study of these meetings to agendas, single cities, or short time horizons. We collect and transcribe a massive new dataset of city council meetings from 115 California cities over the last decade, using advanced transcription and diarization techniques to analyze the speech content of the meetings themselves. We document two sets of descriptive findings: First, city council meetings are frequent, long, and vary modestly across towns and time in topical content. Second, ...
| Authors | Olivia Martin, Amar Venugopal |
|---|---|
| Primary category | econ.EM |
| Published | 23 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 April 2026 |
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