The CTCL Civic Data team is gearing up for a big year in 2018 — stay tuned for announcements about our data release schedule — but last week our past years’ research was again in the national spotlight.

Since 2015, CTCL has partnered with the Women Donors Network’s Reflective Democracy campaign on research into the demographics of candidates and elected officials. This research takes our existing candidate and elected official datasets and adds race and gender, through both independent research and matching to existing modeled data. Our 2015 research on the race and gender of prosecutors, which was featured in the New York Times, found that 95% of elected prosecutors in the United States were white and nearly 80% were white men. This research was again highlighted in the March 14th episode of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, in her segment about prosecutorial discretion. You can watch the clip, with our research appearing around the 2:50 mark, here. [Heads up: the clip includes some salty language.]

More recently, CTCL & WDN’s Reflective Democracy research was included as part of Cosmopolitan’s How to Run for Office feature. This series, appearing both online and in print, focused on personal stories and articles encouraging women across the political spectrum to run for elective office. On March 13, the 2018 National Magazine Awards for Print and Digital Media (known as the Ellies for the award’s pachydermous shape) honored the series with the Ellie in the Personal Service category.

Ellies 2018: @Cosmopolitan wins Personal Service category for “How to Run for Office,” by @laurabrounstein, Meredith Bryan and @jessgood for @Cosmopolitan and @amyodell, @LoriFradkin and @emmajune for https://t.co/jxEpNvPmV7 https://t.co/cHi64ovOuS. #ellies

— ASME (@ASME1963) March 13, 2018

CTCL is proud of the role our research plays in supporting award-winning journalism, and we look forward to continuing our work to help understand how communities across the country work with and are represented by their government.