New publication: Mapping local government priorities

Moritz Schütz, Dr. Lukas Kriesch, and Dr. Sebastian Losacker have successfully published their new article, “Mapping local government priorities: a web-mining approach for regional research“ in the journal Regional Science Policy & Practice

The study addresses the challenge of systematically capturing and comparing the priorities of local and regional governments. Using web mining, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning, over 360,000 paragraphs from German county websites were automatically scraped and processed.

From this corpus, 205 topics were identified, of which 30 prominent examples illustrate the thematic variety at the county level. An in-depth analysis of three selected topics — Urban Development and Planning, Climate Protection Initiatives, and Business Development and Support — reveals how strategic priorities vary across space and how counties differ in their framing of similar topics. By combining web mining and NLP, the approach provides a comprehensive way to map the discursive dimensions of local governance, offering a valuable data resource for both research and policy.

The publication is open access and can be accessed here.