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The Gender and Multicultural Leadership Project (GMCL) is a national study of America's political leadership in the 21st century, with a focus on race, ethnicity, and gender. The project specifically addresses African American, Latina/o, Native American, and Asian American elected officials in U.S. politics. The 2000 U.S. Census points to a need to understand the role of gender and race/ethnicity in today's elected leaders and how this increasingly diversified leadership is becoming incorporated into the governing structures of a nation projected to be "majority-minority" within the next fifty years. Key components of the GMCL Project include a national database of more than 10,000 elected officials of color, by race and gender; an annotated bibliography and analytical framework on the intersection of gender, race/ethnicity, class; and an interactive project website.

The Michigan Public Policy Survey (MPPS) is a program of state-wide surveys of local government leaders in Michigan. The MPPS is designed to fill an important information gap in the policymaking process. While there are ongoing surveys of the business community and of the citizens of Michigan, before the MPPS there were no ongoing surveys of local government officials that were representative of all general purpose local governments in the state. Therefore, while we knew the policy priorities and views of the state's businesses and citizens, we knew very little about the views of the local officials who are so important to the economies and community life throughout Michigan. The MPPS was launched in 2009 by the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (CLOSUP) at the University of Michigan and is conducted in partnership with the Michigan Association of Counties, Michigan Municipal League, and Michigan Townships Association. The associations provide CLOSUP with contact information for the survey's respondents, and consult on survey topics. CLOSUP makes all decisions on survey design, data analysis, and reporting, and receives no funding support from the associations. The surveys investigate local officials' opinions and perspectives on a variety of important public policy issues and solicit factual information about their localities relevant to policymaking. Over time, the program has covered issues such as fiscal, budgetary and operational policy, fiscal health, public sector compensation, workforce development, local-state governmental relations, intergovernmental collaboration, economic development strategies and initiatives such as placemaking and economic gardening, the role of local government in environmental sustainability, energy topics such as hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") and wind power, trust in government, views on state policymaker performance, opinions on the impacts of the Federal Stimulus Program (ARRA), and more. The program will investigate many other issues relevant to local and state policy in the future. A searchable database of every question the MPPS has asked is available on CLOSUP's website. Results of MPPS surveys are currently available as reports, and via online data tables. The MPPS datasets are being released in two forms: public-use datasets and restricted-use datasets. The public use datasets are available on OpenICPSR. Unlike the public-use datasets, the restricted-use datasets represent full MPPS survey waves, and include all of the survey questions from a wave. Restricted-use datasets also allow for multiple waves to be linked together for longitudinal analysis. The MPPS staff do still modify these restricted-use datasets to remove jurisdiction and respondent identifiers and to recode other variables in order to protect confidentiality. However, it is theoretically possible that a researcher might be able, in some rare cases, to use enough variables from a full dataset to identify a unique jurisdiction, so access to these datasets is restricted and approved on a case-by-case basis. CLOSUP encourages researchers interested in the MPPS to review the codebooks included in this data collection to see the full list of variables including those not found in the public-use datasets, and to explore the MPPS data using the public-use-datasets. The codebooks for these restricted use datasets are available for download on CLOSUP's web,site.

The Survey of State Legislators Relationship with their Districts, 2008 collection represents data from state legislators within states that passed an initiative or referendum on same-sex marriage and who responded to a fall 2008 mail survey. The legislators were surveyed about information they use to make decisions (including measures of trustee and delegate styles), how much time they and their staff spend on different tasks, how they try to stay in contact with their constituents (communication methods and social media use), as well as their perceptions of their constituents issue positions. Data were also collected about the district population demographics and ideologies. Additional information was collected about the legislators' previous positions, previous election, and their ambitions regarding whether they aspired to hold a similar office or otherwise. Demographic information included in this collection are sex, year born, and political ideology.