Aleezay Ahmad
Research Mentor: Tyler Simko
Mentor Department: Political Science, LSA
Author(s): Tyler Simko, Aleezay Ahmad
Session: Session 1 (9:00 AM – 9:50 AM)
Presentation Type: Poster 10
Abstract
U.S. local and state governments exert considerable influence over local policies, specifically in regards to areas such as public health, housing, and education. Yet, despite the crucial role these governments play in local policy-making, the lack of standardized reporting makes it difficult to systematically study how local communities approach current issues. Local government participation is the most direct connection to democracy for many Americans. This local engagement often begins as early as grade school, through school board meetings and events. The relationship between this early participation in local conflict and its implications for future political engagement is understudied. Thus, our research seeks to identify how local conflict may lead to increased student participation. This study introduces a coding framework to automatically detect student speech from local government meeting videos to identify patterns in student involvement. Manual data validation has been conducted to ensure accuracy in speech detection, followed by the categorization of student speech to identify the forms and contexts of their engagement. Prominent areas of district-wide conflict include race, gender identity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, this work is a crucial step in better understanding youth political engagement, and the automated methods of data collection introduced in this study can be used to inform future studies on student involvement in politics.
