Measuring Conflict in Local Politics

June 2025

Many of the most tangible and immediate political conflicts in Americans’ lives occur at the local level. Yet, we lack large-scale evidence on how, why, and where conflict occurs in local governments. In this paper, we present a new dataset of nearly 100,000 videos of school board meetings, and use them to create a new measure of local political conflict. We validate this new approach using sentiment analysis and structural topic modeling. We then document consistent results: conflict in school board meetings occurs at some point for most boards and has become more common since 2020, but the most intense conflicts are concentrated in a small number of districts; this conflict often centers cultural issues like racial diversity and gender identity. We then show that conflict, particularly cultural conflict, is most likely to occur in larger school districts in cities and suburbs and in places with more White students.

Keywords

local politics, conflict, text analysis, transparency, debate, school boards, public meetings, culture wars, gender, race

Education level

K-12 Education

Topics

Policy, Politics, and Governance