Introduction: State and local governments are once again emerging as the engines of policymaking in America. For several decades, governments at this level often have been considered backwaters of American democracy. But with Washington suffering from persistent gridlock, the locus of policy experimentation has relocated in recent years to city halls, county courthouses, and state capitols.

The Local Government Elections Project is designed to direct scholarly attention to the recruitment and campaigns of office holders who populate local and state offices. The goal is to begin collecting systematic data on the campaign dynamics of local candidates. In fall, 2008, my students and I will surveyed candidates for county commission seats across Colorado. In fall, 2009, this data collection effort is being extended to candidates for county offices, city council, mayoral, and school board races in six states: Florida, Georgia (Atlanta only), Iowa, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington. These states and races include jurisdictions of vastly differing sizes (both in population and geography) and elective offices with varying sets of responsibilities. They also present a mix of single-member ward style districts and at-large districts, partisan versus nonpartisan elections, and term limited and non-term limited positions.

Background: The project began in the spring of 2007 in a University of Colorado at Boulder classroom with a group of students taking my campaigns and elections course. For their research papers, the students in the class agreed to each conduct a pair of interviews with a successful and unsuccessful candidate who had run for the same seat in a city council or mayoral election in one of the general purpose municipalities along Colorado’s front range, which includes most of cities in the state. The results of the interviews, after masking candidate and city names, were put onto a class website and became the database for all of the papers that the students wrote.

While the final number of interviews available was relatively small, the students arrived at several unexpected findings. One is that in jurisdictions where populations are small, money not only does not predict campaign success but may be a deterrent to success. Another, and it is possible that this is the explanation for the lack of a finding about money in small population jurisdictions, is that the biggest determinant of success appeared to be the amount of time candidates spent canvassing households door-to-door. Another finding of note: incumbency provided almost no advantage in producing electoral success. These findings all suggest that there is something profoundly different about these local races than what the conventional wisdom, most of which is derived from the study of congressional and presidential elections, would suggest. These findings from the student research papers, and the success of the class more generally, were largely responsible for motivating this project.

2008 -- County Commission Candidate Survey: This was a survey of county commission candidates in the state of Colorado during the 2008 general election. This was the first relatively large scale survey of local candidates stemming from the current project. Results of this survey can be found in the attached paper by David Dorey, a paper that became his Honors Thesis, earning him the highest level of Honors conferred by the University of Colorado. Dave is now a law student at the University of Pennsylvania.

2009 – Mayoral, Council, School Board, Special District, and County Office Candidate Survey: This is a study of candidates during the November 2009 election cycle in the states of Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, and the city of Atlanta. In this set of studies, we are using a mix of paper-based survey instruments and web-based surveys. With both survey technologies, we are focusing on the following items:

• Recruitment of candidates to run for the particular position
• Issues that the candidate is emphasizing.
• Campaign finance and the sources of financial resources
• Allocation of time and energy to campaign activities
• Use of paid media
• Decision rules in selecting households for door-to-door canvassing
• Sources of volunteer help
• Demographic and candidate information, including:
• Age
• Gender
• Incumbency status
• Occupation
• Partisan affiliation
• Race & ethnicity
• Attributes of the position, including:
• Single-member versus at-large (for council, commission, and board seats)
• The presence of term-limits
• The presence of party labels on the ballot
• Financial compensation to holders of the position

Future Products: Summary findings and reports will be posted to this site as they become available. For respondents to the surveys that have indicated an interest in being notified of updates, we will send emails when new findings or reports are posted to this website. For additional information, feel free to contact Professor Kenneth Bickers, via phone or email, using the contact information above.