Michigan Public Policy Survey Restricted Use Datasets

Summary:  View help for Summary 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. 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. 

On 2016-08-20, the openICPSR web site was moved to new software. In the migration process, some projects were not published in the new system because the decisions made in the old site did not map easily to the new setup. This project is temporarily available as restricted data while ICPSR verifies that all files were migrated correctly.

Subject Terms:  View help for Subject Terms townships; cities; local government; counties; Michigan; villages; municipalities

Geographic Coverage:  View help for Geographic Coverage Michigan