Research

How U.S. government is organized, measured address by address.

Jurisdictional maps every government that holds responsibility at a point on the map. Our research uses that map to answer descriptive questions about how governments are arranged, staffed and reached. Each study publishes its method and the date it was run, so anyone can check the result or run it again.

Studies

  1. Web archives

    Official government sites in Common Crawl

    17,012 of 35,447 official domains below the federal level (48.0%) had HTML pages in two recent Common Crawl crawls.

    Published

Our approach

We describe how governance is arranged. We do not argue for how it should be arranged.

Describe, don't rank
We report arrangements, counts, costs and dates, not grades.
Absence is a dated claim
"Not found as of a date, after these checks" — never "does not exist".
The method ships with the result
Every study states its sources, rules and run date, so its numbers can be reproduced.
One method for every jurisdiction
No hand-picked examples. The same rules run everywhere.
Open to correction
A government or resident can correct a record, and the correction is tracked like any other change.
Usable across the spectrum
On contested questions we present the evidence each side relies on. The data informs the debate; it does not settle it by framing.

Lineage

Elinor and Vincent Ostrom studied metropolitan areas served by many overlapping governments as "polycentric" systems, and tested how services were actually delivered across them.

The Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations (1959–1996), a bipartisan federal commission, studied how federal, state and local governments divide their responsibilities. Since it closed, no public body has kept that picture current.

Our research continues those questions with address-level data.