The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data
Local governments operate 311 service request lines across the United States, and the publicly available data from these lines provide a continuously measured, geographically fine-grained, and non-self-reported measure of citizens’ interactions with government. It seems a promising measure of neighb...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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SAGE Publications
2020
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128558 |
| _version_ | 1826188081515986944 |
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| author | White, Ariel R. Trump, Kris-Stella |
| author2 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science |
| author_facet | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science White, Ariel R. Trump, Kris-Stella |
| author_sort | White, Ariel R. |
| collection | MIT |
| description | Local governments operate 311 service request lines across the United States, and the publicly available data from these lines provide a continuously measured, geographically fine-grained, and non-self-reported measure of citizens’ interactions with government. It seems a promising measure of neighborhood political participation. However, these data are empirically and theoretically different from many common citizen-level participation measures. We compare geographically aggregated 311 call data with three other measures of political and civic participation: voter turnout, political donations, and census return rates. We show that rates of 311 calls are negatively related to lower cost activities (voter turnout and census return rates), but positively related to the high-cost activity of campaign donation. We caution against interpreting 311 data as a generic measure of political engagement or participation, at least in the absence of high-quality controls for neighborhood condition. However, we argue that these data are still potentially useful for researchers, because they are by definition a measure of the service demands that neighborhoods place on city governments. |
| first_indexed | 2024-09-23T07:54:18Z |
| format | Article |
| id | mit-1721.1/128558 |
| institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-09-23T07:54:18Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| publisher | SAGE Publications |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | mit-1721.1/1285582022-09-23T09:32:15Z The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data White, Ariel R. Trump, Kris-Stella Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science Local governments operate 311 service request lines across the United States, and the publicly available data from these lines provide a continuously measured, geographically fine-grained, and non-self-reported measure of citizens’ interactions with government. It seems a promising measure of neighborhood political participation. However, these data are empirically and theoretically different from many common citizen-level participation measures. We compare geographically aggregated 311 call data with three other measures of political and civic participation: voter turnout, political donations, and census return rates. We show that rates of 311 calls are negatively related to lower cost activities (voter turnout and census return rates), but positively related to the high-cost activity of campaign donation. We caution against interpreting 311 data as a generic measure of political engagement or participation, at least in the absence of high-quality controls for neighborhood condition. However, we argue that these data are still potentially useful for researchers, because they are by definition a measure of the service demands that neighborhoods place on city governments. 2020-11-20T23:07:18Z 2020-11-20T23:07:18Z 2016-11 2020-06-15T16:41:16Z Article http://purl.org/eprint/type/JournalArticle 1078-0874 1552-8332 https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128558 White, Ariel and Kris-Stella Trump. "The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data." Urban Affairs Review 54, 4 (July 2018): 794-823 en http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1078087416673202 Urban Affairs Review Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ application/pdf SAGE Publications MIT web domain |
| spellingShingle | White, Ariel R. Trump, Kris-Stella The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data |
| title | The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data |
| title_full | The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data |
| title_fullStr | The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data |
| title_full_unstemmed | The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data |
| title_short | The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data |
| title_sort | promises and pitfalls of 311 data |
| url | https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/128558 |
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