The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data
Name
promises311data_RR2_unblinded_June2016.pdf
Description
Submitted version
Size
3.51 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
da951970ea9e6abcf0b1ce76879feadc
Author(s)
White, Ariel R.
Trump, Kris-Stella
Date Issued
November 2016
Journal
Urban Affairs Review
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Citation
White, Ariel and Kris-Stella Trump. "The Promises and Pitfalls of 311 Data." Urban Affairs Review 54, 4 (July 2018): 794-823
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Political Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1177/1078087416673202
