Voters in Burlington, Vermont could soon determine whether refugees and permanent residents who aren’t citizens will be allowed to cast their own ballots in local city elections. Councilmember Adam Roof
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Jamie Boex and Sonja Walti While the number of women elected to the U.S. Congress and state assemblies is on the rise, there continues to be a clear gender gap
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The U.S. political system is beset by a high degree of polarization and a low sense of common purpose. Should we blame democracy itself, or should we blame ourselves for
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Local government is the hidden leviathan of American politics: it accounts for nearly a tenth of gross domestic product, it collects nearly as much in taxes as the federal government,
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It is difficult to conceptually measure the degree of “local democracy” in any state or country. It is even harder to measure local government representation in the United States in
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A federal appeals court handed workers in Birmingham, Alabama, a significant win this week as the city is in a battle against state lawmakers over whether it has the right
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Most state constitutions require that counties have an elected sheriff who serves as the county’s chief law enforcement officer. The sheriff’s office is over a thousand years old and today
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County governments are a crucial component of the fabric of American democracy. Yet there has been almost no previous research on the policy effects of the partisan composition of county governments.
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How would you measure the state of local democracy across the U.S.? Are local governments in some states more representative and democratic than in others? How does the United States
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When talking about voting rights cases, the news media often talks about the big cases that involve gerrymandering, voter identification and redistricting, but a lot of legal action around voting
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The shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri brought to light a set of racial injustices in the lived daily experiences of the city’s African American residents. Attempts to understand
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We explore the impacts of minority representation in local governments on distributional outcomes throughout the cities that they govern. In particular, we take advantage of a unique dataset identifying the
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