arXiv 23 Apr 2026 · Econometrics
arXiv:2604.21202 · PDF · DOI · OpenAlex · Extracted main text
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, public participants are substantially older, whiter, more male, more liberal, and more likely to own homes than the registered voter population, and public participation surges when topics related to land use and zoning are included in meeting agendas. Given this skew, we examine the main policy lever municipalities have to shift participation patterns: meeting access costs. Exploiting pandemic-era variation in remote access, we show that eliminating remote options reduces the number of speakers, but does not clearly change the composition of speakers. Collectively, these results provide the most comprehensive empirical portrait to date of who participates in local democracy, what draws them in, and how institutional design choices shape both the volume and composition of public input.
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The works this paper leans on most, across its whole bibliography — not restricted to papers in our corpus. Ranked by composite intensity, which combines how often a work is mentioned, how many sections mention it, and how much of that falls in the main text rather than the appendix.
| Reference | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | Main text | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Einstein, Katherine Levine and Palmer, Maxwell and Glick, David M (2019) Who Participates in Local Government? Evidence from Meeting Minutes | 1.000 | 6 | 5 | 100% |
| 2 | Barari, Soubhik and Simko, Tyler (2023) LocalView, a database of public meetings for the study of local politics and policy-making in the United States | 0.843 | 3 | 3 | 100% |
| 3 | Fischel, William A (2009) The Homevoter Hypothesis: How Home Values Influence Local Government Taxation, School Finance, and Land-Use Policies | 0.737 | 3 | 2 | 100% |
| 4 | Modarressi, Iman and Spiess, Jann and Venugopal, Amar (2025) Causal Inference on Outcomes Learned from Text self | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 5 | Oates, Wallace E (1999) An Essay on Fiscal Federalism | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 6 | Riker, William H. and Ordeshook, Peter C (1968) A Theory of the Calculus of Voting | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 7 | Sahn, Alexander (2025) Public comment and public policy | 0.644 | 2 | 2 | 100% |
| 8 | Callaway, Brantly and Sant’Anna, Pedro H. C (2021) Difference-in-Differences with multiple time periods | 0.585 | 3 | 1 | 100% |
| 9 | CoreLogic NZ Limited and Cotality (2024) Cotality Smart Data Platform: Historical Property | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
| 10 | Einstein, Katherine Levine and Glick, David and Godinez Puig, Luisa… (2023) Still Muted: The Limited Participatory Democracy of Zoom Public Meetings | 0.511 | 2 | 1 | 100% |
Showing the top 10 of 43 scored citations.
arXiv econ.EM papers that cite this one, ranked by how heavily they lean on it.
| Citing paper | Intensity | Mentions | Sections | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Causal Effect Estimation with Latent Textual Treatments | 0.644 | 2 | 2 |