Analysis and Tools
This page provides analyses and tools to empower voters and activists with more information about politics in Allegheny County. We hope that it will help promote more public dialog on where the challenges in the county lie and ways for us to make a difference. We hope that you will find it interesting and useful, and we hope that you will contribute to public dialog with your ideas and analyses as well.
We currently have two types of resources available:
- Election results spreadsheets: more complete results and accessible formats
- Visualization of geographic differences
Motivation
In the Green Party, we look at politics differently than the two entrenched parties. One of our Ten Key Values is Grassroots Democracy, which means in part that we want to empower the grassroots to take an active role in shaping public policy from the bottom up. When we have good ideas, we don't want to enforce them from the top down if the public is unwilling; we want to persuade citizens that the ideas are good and build a mandate from the grassroots. In the process, people may contribute their own ideas that make the final idea better and the mandate stronger.
You may want to contrast this with the two entrenched parties. They have a great deal of information that voters and activists may find helpful in understanding the challenges that face us as a community. But the party institutions are not interested in empowering the grassroots--not even the members of their own party. They use the knowledge they have for the primary goal of winning elections with top-down approaches, often choosing to use the politics of fear on their own members rather than provide them with accurate information. Even worse, they often support candidates that do not share most of the values the party claims to support (and conceal this discrepancy) in the interest of power for the party apparatus.
Whatever party you identify with (including none!), we hope that you will join us in sharing and testing ideas and analyses as we work towards a stronger community. If you are a member of one of the entrenched parties, we encourage you to ask your party leadership to share information they have to empower the grassroots. But don't hold your breath.