LEAP

The Local Elections in America Project (LEAP) is an NSF-funded project that will provide a path-breaking solution to the problem of collecting, digitizing and disseminating data on local elections. Once completed, the LEAP database will provide unparalleled opportunities for learning about local elections and the political, racial and socio-demographic features of American cities and will enable social scientists to investigate research questions that have heretofore been little studied in the context of local politics. Melissa Marschall (Rice University) and I will be using the LEAP database as the foundation for a research project that focuses on the centrality of race/ethnicity in local electoral politics, and in particular two areas of inquiry: (1) minority candidate emergence and ambition, and (2) the role of candidate and voter race/ethnicity in the process and outcome of municipal elections. A complete abstract of the project can be found here.

The Local Candidate Project is a related project that brings social science scholars and the public interested in the who, what, and why of local politics together to address the problem of local election data collection with a unique “crowdsourced” solution. A complete abstract of the project can be found here.