“HLS, HKS Professors Launch New Tool To Assess Local Public Opinion”

This Harvard Crimson story discusses the new TrueViews site that aims to improve representation by providing elected officials with more information about their constituents’ policy views.

Professors from Harvard and George Washington University launched a data visualization tool early last month to help legislators better assess local opinions on policies.

TrueViews — a website built in collaboration between Harvard Law School and the Bloomberg Center for Cities — displays a color-coded United States map containing detailed statistics of political perspectives on a variety of topics, including criminal justice, abortion and gun control.

To create the site, researchers relied on data from 18 national surveys conducted between 2009 through 2023. The site displays public viewpoints on 32 policy questions by zip code, city, county, district, and state.

Harvard Law School professor Nicholas O. Stephanopoulos said he hopes the tool will help bridge the gap between constituents’ desires and elected officials’ policy priorities.

“There’s a distressing pattern today where representation and policy is often quite distorted relative to what people want, and there’s some evidence that some of that distortion is just because policymakers don’t know what people think and want,” Stephanopoulos said.

Stephanopoulos added that, according to the data, the country is less polarized than the public often assumes.

“It was a pleasant surprise to see the variety and the complexity of public opinion, and to see that it doesn’t always boil down to the standard red-blue, or north-south, or city-country cleavages,” he said.

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