 Good morning, and thank you for joining today's event on the functioning of democracy across the urban rural spectrum. I'm Sarah Mills and I'm a project manager at close up the Center for local state and urban policy, which is one of the research centers here at the Ford School. Before getting too far in, I want to first thank close up for funding the research projects that will be presented today, and also to thank body, Bonnie Roberts and Miriam Nagarin for all of their help in pulling to their today's event. I also want to note that this is being hosted as part of the Ford schools conversations across difference initiative. And that the session is being recorded and that the recording and the slides from today's session will be available on close ups website later on this week. And we'll also post the final student research papers later this semester once they've crossed all of their teas and dotted their eyes. So, the idea behind this session is actually a couple of years in the making. When I joined close up in 2015 to help manage the Michigan public policy survey, I was struck by how much data we had from local officials across the urban rural spectrum. For those of you who might not know about it the MPPS is a census survey of all 1856 local governments in Michigan. It's been going on to the top elected and appointed official in each of these jurisdictions so the city mayor and township supervisor the county commission, the county administrator or village manager. It's been going on since 2009. And in that time it has covered pretty much any topic you can imagine about the functioning of local government or issues that impact local communities. The MPPS prides itself on hearing from over 70% of local governments in the state on each of its waves, and we're, and is truly committed to transparency, all of the survey questions from the survey are online. There's pre made data tables broken down by region of the state population size jurisdiction type. There's also anonymized data sets that are available for you to use. And these are shared through ICPSR. But what I think is truly remarkable is that this data allows for some amazing insights into issues across the urban rural continuum. Most surveys are sent base are based on individual responses and so survey respondents tend to be only about 20% of the sample, given that they are 20% of the population. But because the MPPS in the MPPS every unit of government is contacted and counts as one response, whether you are the tiniest township in the upper peninsula or you are the city of Detroit. We have an amazing amount of data coming from rural areas to allow for a large enough sample size to actually compare urban and rural places. So for the analysis that the students are using today, we base it on us census classification of census tracks within a jurisdiction. So, from jurisdictions that have only rural census tracks, or only urban or urban cluster census tracks to those in the middle. And those kind of mostly rural and mostly urban classifications are based on the percentage of the jurisdictions population that's in a rural or urban or urban cluster census track. I should just note that there are a bunch of different ways to measure rurality, but we found that this one is the closest represents how survey respondents the local officials that the census, the census survey is sent to think about their own place. Today's lineup includes five master students who are all using this four way measure of reality with existing data from the MPPS. The topics that they'll be covering have some connection to the functioning of democracy mostly at the very local level. And you can see here that they pull from a variety of past MPPS data sets. Before handing the floor over to them, I want to make sure and make the pitch that there are many more papers about urban and rural similarities and differences that can be written from the MPPS data. And so you can learn more about accessing the data through this link that I've shared here, and that, once I'm done speaking I can share out in the chat. Or by contacting us through this email address. In terms of format for the session. We're going to have all five of the speakers go in sequence, and then I'll moderate the question and answer session at the end so feel free to post questions in the Q&A function or that's the easiest way for us to find them, but you can also use the chat along the way. And so do post them as those questions come to you. And then now without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to the first speaker who is Kyron Smith Kyron if you want to start sharing your screen. While I introduce you, he is a first year master of public policy candidate at the Ford School, and he's going to share about local officials perceptions of civic discourse. Hi everyone, my name is Kyron Smith, and as Sarah mentioned I am a first year master of public policy student at the Ford School. Today I'll be presenting on my project entitled elected officials perceptions of civic discourse with and among residents across the urban rural spectrum. To begin I want to go over my methods, as they are key to understanding this research, and some of the slides that follow. In this presentation we're taking from the spring 2018 MPPS survey, and these questions revolved around civic discourse across the state of Michigan and different jurisdictions. Now another thing I want to note because this is based off of the urban and rural spectrum I want to talk about how I determine urban and rural jurisdictions as my method of getting these are a little different than some of the presentations that you'll see later on. For my survey in spring 2018, the question was actually asked to elected officials, how they characterize their jurisdictions, and in that it yielded these variables to determine the rurality and urban entity of the different jurisdictions, where we have rural, mostly rural, mostly urban, urban and and don't know. These survey responses were cross tabulated and analyzed with the different questions about civic discourse in this presentation. The first question we'll go over is civic discourse between elected officials and residents. As you can see, and what I would like to point out is that along the rural to urban spectrum, we see a trend where the plurality of respondents all agree that civic discourse between elected officials and residents is somewhat constructive, where we see in the rural jurisdictions, 38.8% of respondents said it was somewhat constructive and mostly rural 40.8 and mostly urban 42.2 and an urban 43%. What is important about this finding is that in the time where we see a lot of divisiveness and a lot of differences between the urban rural spectrum, we see off of this first question that there is agreement about civil discourse and the overall understanding that elected officials generally believe that civic discourse in the sense is somewhat constructive. Now let me move to our next question, which is civic discourse among residents. Now keep in mind the survey was given to elected officials, and their responses are based off of how they perceive this discourse is among residents. So when we look at this trend, we see something similar, which is where urban through rural, we see a trend that everyone agrees pretty much on the plural result. What we see in rural municipalities, 39.6% of respondents believe that civic discourse among residents was a mix of both constructive and divisive, mostly urban, or I'm sorry, mostly rural 35.9%, mostly urban 48.1%, and urban 44.8%. What I also thought was worth noting is the second highest response, where we see that most of these jurisdictions have respondents who say that the second highest response is somewhat constructive. This kind of leans to the thought that elected officials generally think positively about the civic discourse and their jurisdictions. The main response in this question was mixed, and the first one was somewhat constructive, and here the second highest response is somewhat constructive. And even looking at the number of divisive responses is very low across these two questions. Now let's look at how this has changed in the last five years, and what civic discourse looks like through the tone of discussion. Keep in mind this survey was done in 2018, so we're talking about the range of time between 2013 to about 2018. When we look at this, we see between elected officials and residents, also the trend continues, where across the urban and rural spectrum, the highest response was that civic, that civil discussion so the tone and civil discussion was neither more nor less civil. When we talk about among residents we see something similar. What was worth noting again when talking about elected officials and residents is that second highest response. So we see that across the rural and urban spectrum, all of them agree kind of that the second highest response is, is consistent across the urban and rural spectrum, which was somewhat more civil. What's different and interesting, however, is when we look at among residents, so discourse that excludes the elected official. We see in rural rural settings that it's generally positive so the second answer, the second most common answer was someone more civil. However, when we go to the more urban parts, we see that the second highest response was somewhat less civil, kind of leading to a less positive level of elected officials in urban versus, but please remember the overall finding is that they tend to agree in the trend that neither more nor less civil, the conversation has become. So, keep in mind the question or just think about the question, how do elected officials think of discourse when they are not involved. What we see is that elected officials feel civil discourse is more positive when they're involved versus when they're not. So we have some of the questions when we looked at the state of discourse between elected officials and residents, 66% of the respondents thought that discourse was constructive. When we look among residents, they found that 38% of discourse between residents was constructive, which was a 28 point difference. In the five year question, we saw that elected officials and residents among their conversations was 34% constructive. And when we remove the elected officials and just looked at discourse among residents it was 23% constructive 11 points lower. With this kind of yields is to the thought that elected officials believe that when they are involved that civic discourse is more positive. As I mentioned earlier, we live in a time and a day where people are particularly divisive, especially across urban and rural spectrums where they think elected officials think fundamentally different. This research points to otherwise as elected officials along the urban and rural spectrum have shown in this in these questions to think similarly about civil to civic discourse. Knowing this can change the perception about how elected officials feel about civic discourse. It can change the perception that the way they feel does not depend on the urbanity or reality. And moving forward, this allows research to better assess more current and factors and why civic discourse across jurisdictions is the way that it is, since it's likely is not due to whether they are urban or rural jurisdictions. Thank you. Thank you very much Kyron. Next up is Carly Thurston. She is a first year master of public policy candidate at the Ford School as well. And she's going to be talking about local officials perspectives on public participation. And again, if you have any questions for Kyron or Carly or any of the other speakers please. You can type them into the Q&A and we'll collate them for later on. Alright, thanks Sarah. Well, good morning everyone. So let's launch right in. Let's take a look at how civic participation in their local decision making varies or doesn't across the urban or rural spectrum. So, first off, measuring participant public participation can be a little bit tricky. A lot of things go into the level of sort of civic participation, as well as the determine the most effective means for getting citizens to help with decision The sort of most clear and best studied of these are individual level factors such as education, age, income, other demographic factors. But there's also a lot of societal factors that are a little bit harder to grasp. That can mean whether the government is structured in a decentralized enough way to allow for citizen participation, the level of public interest, perceived roles of citizens with their government and sort of semi individual factors like social networks. The way that the urban and rural spectrum plays into this hasn't really been particularly well studied, certainly not in the US. There are sort of mixed results from international literature. So a Thai study reported greater urban engagement. There have been pretty successful rural development measures in kind of across India, Europe, Australia. And so we're kind of curious how those might play out here in Michigan. So in order to detangle the urban and rural effects we kind of need to control for some of those other factors. So Christian is going to get very much in depth on citizen engagement here in a minute, but just to kind of provide us a benchmark. I've got an aggregate for you here. So the bolded numbers are the ones that scored the best so to speak in each category. And here are citizen interest. This government decision making transparent do citizens want to be involved that sort of thing. This disinterest score is like whether officials report having trouble finding people to serve on committees. And then we got the percentage of officials that are saying citizens should have the final say on controversial decisions, and they can usually be trusted to be responsible for the decisions. And there are variations between these categories in aggregate they're they're much stronger for each sort of individual factor. But overall there's not really a clear pattern so we can kind of as we're measuring availability and effectiveness of participation, we can kind of account for interest being similar. So PPS asks officials if they foster participation through 20 different sort of mechanisms. And I looked at these both individually and altogether, as well as sort of in subgroups for one way information sharing, sort of two way limited meaning and communication and sort of more ongoing formal participation actions category. And there was no questions for availability so they were aggregated and an average to cross each type of jurisdiction to find the sort of percent of opportunities that each official makes available. So the responses here are not nearly so ambiguous as the interest level measurements. So the orange section here is completely rural just jurisdictions. The blue is completely urban. The color seems to stick around. And we can see that urban jurisdictions far and away are offering more means of public participation. What we're not seeing however is that there being rating these methods as more effective. So for each yes response officials were then asked to rate the effectiveness of those measures. So the table to your left again the bolded numbers have the highest scores on on a scale of one to five. Urban jurisdictions rated the highest overall in terms of effectiveness and in two of the three subcategories but as you can see from the table, these were really minimal differences and they were not statistically significant. So that any of the aggregated levels, a couple of the methods individually saw some major variation below here, you can kind of see the aggregate effectiveness of all measures. And you can see that the distribution tracks really closely for each kind of area, the black bar here is the total. In general, we're seeing pretty, pretty warm feelings about the effectiveness of public participation. So if you look a little bit closer at these look at these subgroups for availability. We saw that these findings were consistent across each group. So you've got the completely urban areas are seeing the most information mechanisms, the most meeting mechanisms and the most sort of active participation methods. And consistent. When these features were regressed on things like education population poverty rate even interest, some of those other variables that were prominent in the literature. I, we've still saw the most availability from urban areas, but still pretty mixed effectiveness ratings. Participatory budget adoption is kind of a specific case study of public participation. So while this is primarily a rural initiative worldwide. Here we still got that urban areas are using the most sort of methods to involve citizens in their budget setting, though they also have the highest percentage of saying that they did not use any. So, that means urban areas that did involve citizens in their budget making use a lot of methods but rural areas were slightly more likely to do at least one. So to wrap things up, I, across the urban and rural spectrum. citizen and official interest in being involved is pretty consistent, and the effectiveness of public participation is pretty similar, but urban areas are offering a lot more formal avenues to participation. So that is a few things we might not be fully capturing the way that rural officials are engaging their citizens. They can also just mean that urban officials are well aware that with kind of a larger population. They need a little bit broader of a strategy to get citizens involved. And this is important because kind of knowing knowing these things and knowing how to best encourage civic engagement. I allows for flexible and effective policy at the local level, which leads to better economic outcomes, better community inclusion, and can also kind of help account for more private and national policy. And that is all I thought for you today. Thank you. Thank you very much Carly. Christian Hunter is up next Christian is a second year master of urban and regional planning student. And he's going to, as Carly mentioned carry on this theme about talking about public participation, looking specifically at local officials perceptions of citizen engagement. And folks that are listening to the webinar if you have any questions for any of the panelists feel free to post them in Q&A or the chat function and we'll we're running on track so we'll have plenty of time to answer those at the end. Go ahead Christian. Okay, great. Good morning everyone. As Sarah said I just want to carry on the conversation, looking at citizen engagement across the rural urban spectrum. To start, I'd actually like to define what citizen engagement is. I actually found this very helpful definition from the APA that says that individual and collective actions designed to identify and address issues of public concern. And I wanted to lay out some examples as well. The surveys are often used as well as open houses and brainstorming sessions and then as Carly touched on in her presentation also participatory budget meetings can be an example of citizen engagement. And as the theme generally states I wanted to see how perceptions of citizen engagement differ across urban rural areas, as well as some of the different implementations that might arise. So some of the methods that I used, I analyzed data from the Michigan public policy survey from fall 2012 using weighted cross tabulation. And for my specific questions, I chose questions looking at sort of three main buckets or themes that will touch on throughout this presentation. The first is the current status of disengagement. Some of the qualities there and how they might differ across the rural and urban spectrum approaches to citizen engagement, how this differs between urban and rural areas. And then looking at different jurisdictions opinions on what says engagement is for and they got whether this is different or similar. To start with the current status is engagement. I'm going to just right jump right in for a warning I have a lot of charts, so bear with me. One of the first things that I found is that opportunities for citizen engagement generally aren't being taken. There was actually a previous question on the survey before this one asked about jurisdictions whether they provide everyone to have a voice in the community and overwhelmingly 80% of jurisdictions across the rural and urban spectrum said yes. However, when it came to opportunities, whether agreeing whether opportunities aren't being taken. Unfortunately, again across the urban and rural spectrum. There's strong agreement that this was the case that citizens weren't necessarily taking advantage of all these opportunities that were being provided to voice their opinions. This can be seen in an additional dimension as well. And who's showing up. I know that a lot of us, perhaps, when we think about citizen engagement we think of town hall meetings where, you know, the people that have the most active voice show up over and over again. And the data is sort of bearing this out again across the urban and rural spectrum which is very interesting that there was actually very little variation in this answer. Most jurisdictions strongly or somewhat agreed that their efforts tend to detract the same people over and over. Both of these responses are interesting because they can inform. First of all, it shows that it's a common issue and it's not necessarily relegated to whether the areas are rural or urban and potentially offers opportunities. There are very effective policies that can sort of help with that across both types of jurisdictions. For the second category, looking at approaches to citizen engagement. So one of the common things that arose was this idea of formal engagement versus informal engagement. And how communities perceive this differently. So communities in the across the urban and rural spectrum were actually asked. Whether they agree with a statement that they don't need formal engagement efforts because our local officials already know what the citizens want. So actually, most like completely and mostly urban areas actually very much disagree in saying that we would like to pursue more formal engagement efforts. However, this actually for mostly rural and completely rural areas, this was a little bit, perhaps more. Not necessarily a pro but more of an ambivalence towards us saying that, you know, we, we may or may not agree with a statement necessarily. But it's important to note that despite this formal informal that engagement is still happening in these communities, it's just a matter of the form that it takes. And one of these questions touches on this a little bit. This one is particularly interesting looking at whether jurisdictions agree that some of the best engagement with citizens happens informally around the community. Overwhelmingly jurisdictions across the rural and urban spectrum agreed. It's sort of expected going into this that the mostly rural and completely rural areas would have a high level of agreement, given that they are tend to more be more reliant on informal engagement as per the earlier question. However, what is heartening to see is that completely and mostly urban areas also agree with us. And this sort of set of in questions is important for the larger discussion of this section. Seeing how perhaps like local communities in mostly rural and completely rural areas tend to use more informal methods but perhaps in completely urban and mostly urban areas. They are using a combination of both informal and formal approaches. And the last, the last set of questions I'm going to just quickly dive into is looking at what citizen, what is an engagement and how this view is different, or similar across the rural and urban spectrum. So what is interest so for this set, I looked at both how the jurisdiction council and boards of these communities so sort of think of as the people in charge, how they've uses engagement. And then, comparing that with how employees of these jurisdictions use it as an engagement. So to start across the rural and urban spectrum, the majority of the jurisdiction councils and boards believe that says engagement, mainly exists to have citizens provide input, a much smaller percentage closer to about 20% across the rural and urban spectrum think it's more for keeping citizens informed. However, this is notable again because there's a lack of difference here, which suggests that even in very different potentially like demographic or spatial make ups that these councils and boards feel very similarly. This did break down. However, when we looked at jurisdictional employees. So for mostly rural and completely rural areas. This trend continued to hold so that most, most completely rural and mostly rural employees actually thought that the main point was to provide input for for having citizen provide input. However, in urban areas, there was a much higher percentage that thought it was mainly to keep citizens informed. Not only is this difference interesting and potentially looking at different policy interventions and different says engagement strategies across rural and urban areas. But it also sheds light on potential disconnects between the higher up council board members and then the employees that actually go about implementing citizen engagement. And last but not least, I just want to leave you all with this question. Are we satisfied so jurisdictions across the rural urban spectrum were asked this question and generally. Right, some of the issues such as people same people showing up over and over. And, you know, students not taking advantage. Generally they are satisfied. I would say somewhat satisfied is the most common category, which potentially leaves room for improvement, but that it is functioning as is. All right. That's the end of my presentation. And I want to turn it back over to Sarah. Great. Thank you Christian. Julie Rubin is up next and she is a second year master of public policy candidate at the Ford School. And she is going to talk about internet connectivity and access to information across the spectrum. We have seen some questions come in some one through the Q&A but a couple also in chats to the panelists so we're collecting them and will turn to them after Julie and Christina go. Thank you Sarah. So hello my name is Julie Rubin and today I'll be talking about internet access and connectivity across the urban rural spectrum and I think it's a really nice bridge between Christian and Karlie's presentation on civic engagement. So while access to broadband has expanded and might seem ubiquitous these days, there does remain a digital divide between those who have access to internet and those who don't. And when this digital divide falls along the urban rural spectrum, it can contribute to a rural penalty, which is a collection of disadvantages that folks in rural areas might suffer due to being far from markets or not having access to internet and goods. And you can especially think of that today when we're all so reliant on our internet that not having that solid access can really build up. So access to broadband is generally correlated with an increased access to goods and government services. So one mitigating strategy for this rural penalty is to provide an official jurisdiction website that has information about government services and also government information. For this project I looked at how urban and rural areas differ in their access to local government services via technology, and similar to Christian I also used the fall 2012 MPPS data. I looked at questions related to jurisdictions use of technology to engage their citizens, as well as the services that are provided through a jurisdictions website if they have one. And while I recognize that 2012 is pretty far off in terms of technology. I also found some information from this past year from connected nation on Michigan's broadband access and while it doesn't direct, it's not directly analogous. Because it talks more about broadband access and speed that there still remains a divide between urban and rural areas that I'm about to show you so I think that it, it still holds up, although the effect size maybe a bit smaller. So just to jump in. The first question I looked at was the extent that jurisdictions try to engage their citizens through technology and the green bar at the top is the one to really pay attention to here. So urban areas engage citizens through technology more than rural areas. You can see that a completely rural area. About 30% of jurisdictions don't engage their citizens through technology at all, compared with almost 100% for the completely urban areas. You can imagine this has impacts on citizen engagement, as well as public participation as well. A similar trend is related to jurisdictions official websites. So urban areas are more likely to have an official website than rural areas you can see. 39% of completely urban areas do have an official website, and that number drops down to a little bit below 60% for a completely rural area. And then, of course, we can look into what's offered on a website if a rural area has one. So I've broken this out into two areas. Access to online government services and access to information so we'll look at online government services first. This is just one question that was asked on the survey, but I think it's pretty representative of the other questions, the same trend line ensues. So completely urban districts are more likely to offer online services such as taxes, paying fines or working through permitting issues through their website. And this is just for jurisdictions who have an official website. Well, completely rural districts, you can see that number is much lower, just a little bit more than 10%. In addition to these online government services, rural areas also have less access to online government information. Now this is a pretty jarring example. The effect wasn't quite as large in the questions related to posting meeting agendas and meeting minutes. But it's still pretty clear that rural areas, even those who do have a website are a lot less likely to post online government information. And you can imagine that this has implications for how people can interact with their public officials, how they can get involved in meetings and decisions. And creates barriers if you have to travel a long distance to go to a government public forum or meeting or to go to an office to complete a service outside of working business hours. Additionally, there were also differences between urban and rural areas in regards to barriers to using technology. So you can imagine that rural areas who perhaps don't have access to high speed internet are a bit more at the beginning of the technology adoption. So their issues are more related to lack of high speed internet and also lack of infrastructure, while an urban area that has already possibly has a website and technology up and running is more concerned with issues related to compliance and privacy. So making sure that everything is aligned with state and local and federal laws. Although there are many differences, as you can see, urban and rural areas do report similar satisfaction levels with what's being offered online so public officials generally believe at the same rates across the urban rural spectrum, that what they're offering works for their citizens or doesn't work, and that that they're doing a sufficient job at providing services and information. So this leaves a few questions such as, I think it'd be really interesting to see what this looks like today and how the rate of adoption of these different technologies differs across the urban and rural areas in the past eight years. Thank you very much Julie. I would like to acknowledge that one of the questions that came in is about the timing of the data and that's one of the things that Julie highlighted as well that repeating this is maybe warranted. Last but not least is Christina Curtis. So while she is working on getting her screen shared I will introduce her she's a first year master of public policy candidate at the Ford School. And as you can see she's going to tell us about perceptions on privatization of local government services. Hi everyone, like Sarah said my name is Christina Curtis and I am a first year master's public policy student at the Ford School over the past semester I've spent my time researching what local privatization looks like across the urban and rural spectrum. So to begin, I think it's important to understand why this conversation is important and that's because for decades municipalities have taken on numerous tasks that the private sector would have otherwise performed. We saw this trend starting in the early 1900s and urban areas who were able to expand public services through things like public parks, public spaces and day to day services, and we saw that mount across the nation until about the 1980s. We saw the Reagan administration in the ideology of don't just stand there, undo something. Because of this we saw the trend of privating or creating contracted out services accelerate through the 90s and into what we see today. And today experts estimate that about a trillion dollars in America's six trillion spending and annual federal and local governments goes towards providing services for through private companies, while it may not be particularly clear on face privatization. And the ways that local governments prioritize it are equally about questions of why democracies function. The early literature that talks about privatization is worried about how privatization is evaluated and there's a current push for a form of responsible contracting where we've seen currently 18 states in New York municipalities have put forth laws to meet a responsible contracting standard. However, Michigan and our municipalities Michigan are not one of these areas. Thus we see these calls for transparency and accountability as a request for an increase in government oversight. And finally, I think it's important to analyze or understand that the research about privatization across an urban world spectrum does not currently exist and is important that we use this data to understand what nuances in the literature look like, because I know that experts agree that privatization is neither inherently good or inherently bad but the goals that local officials municipalities use to increase a local government priority of privatization may craft a public narrative that forces people to believe otherwise. For example, municipality may cite something like a budget shortfall or an economic shortfall in their region as a reason why contracting out services is important because a private service on the market. Provides a profit as opposed to something like party identification which we seen as a negative perception, especially in terms of Democrats who are more likely to come forward against privatization. Because of things like sympathy towards unions at the end of the day, however, it's a private decision or a political decision that can be impacted by quite a few other factors. So, similar to everyone else, I do, wow, I produced a weighted cross tabulation to understand how certain variables impact privatization across the urban world spectrum. The first question I asked was whether or not municipalities contract out services and you can see based off of the results that the dark blue areas indicate yes municipalities currently do contract services we see obviously in every single area that there is no contract out services, however, they're more likely to occur in urban and completely, mostly around completely urban areas. After seeing the results, I was curious to understand how these results impact what we know based off of the literature so holding all those constant. I wanted to determine if the location municipalities location on the urban world spectrum, the municipalities political party or the risk of the municipality finding a budget shortfall would impact the relationship between whether or not a municipality determines that they want to contract out service. While we see similar to how I mentioned that there's a positive relationship between a municipality being considered urban and their willingness to contract out services. We found that there is not a statistically significant and or relationship at all between whether or not partisan identity of a municipality or risk of a budget shortfall impacts the choice. Thus, we see that the literature at the urban world spectrum actually contradicts claims that privatization choices are made for budgetary choices and or political reasons, which displays that there's both a lack of uniformity in conversations about privatization and that existing literature does not currently take into account the nuances of the urban world spectrum and their decision making process. After this, I wanted to understand what services were likely to be contracted out and or to see how this impacts the way that we think about oversight of these services. And I think that this cuts two ways. The first is that we found significantly that services that were unlikely to be privatized were the same across the entirety of the spectrum. We see things like utilities emergency services public spaces like parks and recreation and or revenue collection such as tax collection, and things to that extent, but for services that are likely to prioritize those significantly across the urban world spectrum, which brings us to understand kind of what services are in high demand in certain areas, and or like I said it's important context understand how that impacts the type of credibility necessary. Finally, we see that across the spectrum jurisdictions feel okay with the choices that they have made to privatize certain services. We see in the dark blue areas that jurisdictions think I have too much privatization as opposed to the light blue words jurisdictions who think they have the right amount, as opposed to the tan color who feel like they have not enough services and while we see at the urban in mostly urban areas that there are still municipalities who think they have not contract out enough services as of 2014 MPPS. We still see that numerous municipalities think that they have reached the right amount of privatization in their areas. And that also begs the question, why do we care about how municipalities feel about their privatization. I think that this comes back to similar what everyone else said is that we know that these questions of privatization are both a question of accountability but also we see that municipalities on the urban side of the spectrum indicate that they don't feel like there's enough privatization, which leaves open continual important hole in the data that requires further research to understand how privatization continues to impact accountability local government priorities and the funding of democracy within municipalities across the urban real spectrum. So to recap, we see that there's no difference in the privatization of whether or not a local municipal services likely prioritize over the urban real spectrum, however, the services that are privatized may vary and or the willingness and the comfortability on also of privatizing will does not change over the spectrum, however, there's a non significant relationship where urban areas who may desire to prioritize more services than already exist. Amazing job folks. And I, if you haven't seen them there are a number of chats coming in giving complimentary, you know, notes about your presentations. Well, and if you panelists all want to turn on your videos. I, there, I have a couple of questions that are specific to some of you that will try to do rapid fire. And then there's some that I think are something that can go that anybody can answer. Carly, the first one is for you. If you can talk us just briefly through how effectiveness was defined for survey respondents, and, and you mentioned something about links between what the tool was and how effective it was seen but if you can talk us through some examples of that. And then finally, because you were in this survey, more recently than I was, whether officials linked that participation to affecting policy change like to actually policy decisions I can't remember if that was asked or not so. Yeah, any bits and pieces of that. Cool. I'm going to start with that last one just quick and easy. Unfortunately, no, there weren't any questions on measuring follow up, although there were similar questions in some ways asked in 2016, but no it's that it can go on the wish list along with updated internet access for next time. So, to your other two points, Amy, thanks for your questions. Okay, so effectiveness was asked subjectively. Basically, they were asked to rate effectiveness on a one to six scale so extremely effective, somewhat effective, neither effective nor ineffective all the way on down to don't know. And that's what I quoted for effectiveness, where I had removed the don't know which is about 5% of each response, just to kind of clear up the visualization a little bit. And there was a little bit of a relationship between type of participation and effectiveness but I actually didn't check to see significance so in all the sort of average effectiveness rating was better for meetings and for actions that it was for but it was I think the difference was between 3.75 of an average rating and 4.2 or so. So potentially some some interaction there. Oh, no, I think I think about all the pieces. I think so. Thanks and and just a note this is true for all of these papers. These are works in progress. I encourage you to reach out to me or to the students themselves as they are finalizing these because your questions help them, you know determine what additional bits of detail they include in those papers so do feel free like your your comments are fantastic. Julie, a couple of these are I think more comments for you, rather than questions and one was, why did you use the 2012 data. And we already addressed this that like new data would be great and what do you think you would find differently you can add on to that if you want. I'd like to note that this summer there was some MPPS research that found that 10% of jurisdictions, mostly those with fewer than 5000 residents so small places, mostly rural but it could also be kind of some. I'm imagining some more urban esque villages that struggled with internet access issues when it came to running virtual meetings. So do you have any comments to add on to kind of those. I think it's really interesting and I'm sure that's been something we're seeing in a lot of rural areas as they try to very quickly pivot to online offerings. Both like through official government channels and also just making sure that everyone has access that they need to work or go to school. So as far as why I use the 2012 that that survey really went into depth on technology and asked all the questions about websites and concerns about setting up technology. There was a question in 2019 about concerns related to census access. And I would definitely love more information more recent information would be grand. Christian quick question for you from Julia is on the question of what's the role of citizen engagement, were respondents able to select one option or more than one. And she notes that to keep citizens informed and to provide input were the most highly rated but they're really complimentary. And so it could be both and you didn't said I will say you didn't set up the survey questions right you you were working with data and questions that were already drafted. Based on what you found. Do you think would you write the question differently. If this is asked again. That's a great question actually. And from what I remember, I'll have to, I'll have to go back and double check. I'm pretty sure it was. The question was actually more correctly phrased as like which one do you think like what do you think is the primary role. That being said, I wasn't. I'm not particularly sure if they're able to choose more than one or not that's a, that's more of a actual survey question. Like response but you know actually in a way though I think that's actually a great point that for this particular part. You know they were made, maybe only able to choose the primary one but I think being able to choose, perhaps either like a ranked choice or, or a multiple choice option might actually be better and yield some sort of additional nuances. Great. Christina. Is there any consistency in which services are privatized in urban areas and not rural ones. Is there any consistency in which services are privatized in urban areas and not rural ones. And do you happen to know which are privatized in in those in urban places and not necessarily rural places. So there is a difference yes a consistent difference no so we see services such as like waste recycling and or things like engineering services and land use planning being more likely to be contracted out in urban areas, as opposed to like certain like common municipal priorities such as like street lighting and or snow plowing, which are more likely to be contracted in areas that fit the rural side of the spectrum. I could guess that maybe this occurs with things such as like land use planning and engineering there's a higher availability of contracts and or a better quality of contractors in urban areas for more likely to have the education to support. But outside of that there is nothing at least that is captured in the MPPS that explains otherwise, why these differences exist across the spectrum. Excellent. Kyra and the questions didn't start coming until after your presentation. So I'm going to, I'm going to give you the ones that were to all panelists and you get to choose first which question which of those you want to answer and then, if they if we still have time in the like four minutes that we have left others can can post in. So one question is about whether anything surprised you in terms of what you're seeing we were often seen as urban and rural divide, we've, we've said that this is urban and urban continuum so is there anything that you found that that fit that or or kind of was contrary to the kind of overall narrative in this space. Where do marches and demonstrations kind of fall into this like what opportunity what do you think that this is going to change the discourse and lead to more common ground, based on what you found on civic engagement. And do any breakups and I can't remember on race or ethnicity or income and did you find anything interesting there. And then finally one that you could choose to answer or not is how you think public public opinion might compare to what you found. All of you looked at just local official opinion. My guess is that that one you might have something in particular to say on that one Kyron, but you can answer any of them. Yeah. So a few from what I remember. As far as what surprised me, and this kind of touches on the question about marches I think Chuck pose. So what I was expecting when looking at the 2018. Discourse was that generally I expected that rural settings will have more of a positive perception, as far as elected officials on House of discourse was, but I was, I wasn't expecting urban that be the same way. Particularly I would think you know there's more people more politics involved in urban jurisdictions. So I was, I was thinking going in that we will see that difference where the urban settings would be a little less positive civil discourse and urban the other way. What was interesting though, as I mentioned in my presentation when we looked at the five year questions. Still, the plurality, plurality response. That there was neither more or less civic discourse as far as tone positive. But the second response did kind of go towards what I've originally thought which was that rural settings fell more positive about their civic discourse and urban settings didn't and looking at that question talking about a five year comparison. You know we think about between 2013 and 2018 what happened you know you saw more protests about police violence you saw you know the election of another president. So I think, think of now also you know that, and especially with everything that happens that has happened in 2020 with protests and with elections. I'm interested to see how that would change for another five years or in this year and particularly don't remember the other questions, but you know you did it you did a great job and I'm actually going to have to wrap it up because we're going to turn into a pumpkin and the webinar is going to end here. I want to body if you have the closing slide that we can pull up just which I assume might have the URL on it just to thank again, both the panelists and all of the folks who listened as I mentioned please do. If you've got some feedback, reach out to us. And if you are inspired by looking at other questions across the urban rural continuum do contact us and let us know. The recording will be online and we're still working on finalizing the papers so thank you so much for joining today. Have a great day.