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Authors: Matthew Denny, Bruce Desmarais, Hanna Wallach

Title: Reading between the emails: How communication among local government employees correlates with employee gender

Local government bureaucracies play a critical role in implementing policies developed at all levels of government. Most research on local government has focused on official government statistics or retrospective survey data. Primary source information on the internal day-to-day operation of governments holds the potential to overcome information gaps and biases inherent in official statistics and surveys. However, primary source data on internal operations is costly to collect. One promising avenue for cost-effective study of internal government operation is through the analysis of officials' electronic communication (email) data, which is public record for most local governments. We can learn much about internal government operations from email communication data through both the content of the messages, and the patterns of who sends and receives them. The content presents a corpus that can be studied through text analysis, and the sender and recipient information forms a network within which the textual content is embedded. We present and validate methods for analyzing local government email corpora, and apply them to a novel dataset that includes county government department manager email communications from 17 North Carolina counties. In particular, we focus on how the contents of the emails and the positions of managers in the county communication networks correlate with gender.