Towards a Measure of Local Legislative Professionalism
Christopher A. Cooper (Western Carolina University) and Heather N. Rimes (Western Carolina University)
It is hard to think of a measure in state politics that has aided in more empirical insights than Peverill Squire’s tripartite measure of state legislative professionalism. By cataloguing the salary, staffing, and session length data from across the country’s 99 state legislative chambers and placing the resulting figure as a percent of the same metrics in Congress, Squire’s (2017) index of state legislative professionalism provides a reliable, consistent measure of legislative professionalism that has been linked to the power of various actors in the policy process (Woods and Baranowski 2006), how legislators relate to constituents (Harden 2013), and even what kinds of policies they pass (Kousser 2005).
Although we might expect that similar dynamics would be at play in local legislatures, there is no parallel measure of professionalism available for scholars of local and urban politics; the only extant measure of sub-state legislative professionalism was applied to 210 school boards in California (Grissom and Harrington 2013). The Grissom and Harrington measure is based on salary, time demands and staffing, mirroring the Squire measure at the school board level. In addition to the contribution to the study of school boards, Grissom and Harrington’s work reminds us of the need for a measure of professionalism at the local level. As they explain, “…[T]he study of professionalism should not be confined to state legislatures. Like state legislators, local legislatures vary with respect to the kinds of resources—legislative salaries, time, and support staff—that are commonly used to capture professionalism” (Grissom and Harrington 2013, p. 77). Armed with a systematic measure of professionalism that can be applied across municipalities, scholars could uncover the ways in which local government structures enhance or repress representation and government performance. In our recent paper, “Towards a Measure of Local Legislative Professionalism,” we aim to provide exactly that.
Our measure relies on Squire’s central logic that legislative professionalism can best be understood through a combination of salary, staffing, and session length. To collect each component of the measure, we rely on the most recent iteration of ICMAs form of government survey. This survey and its earlier iterations have been used to address important questions about municipal structure (e.g. DeSantis and Renner 2002) and local government representation (Tausanovitch and Warshaw 2014). The 2018 ICMA survey was sent to 12,761 municipal clerks across the country and returned by just over 32% of them (n=4,109). The responding municipalities range from large cities with over a million people to small municipalities with fewer than 2,500 people.
To measure salary, we rely on responses to a question that asks clerks “are any council members (excluding the chief elected official) paid an annual salary or stipend for any of their services?” Approximately 84% of the responding municipalities responded in the affirmative, and we use this data to create a dichotomous measure that is coded 1 for councils that are salaried and 0 otherwise. Although we use the dichotomous measure for our scale, a separate question also asks respondents from cities that do pay a legislative salary to indicate the actual annual salary. The average (mean) municipality with full-time council that pays a salary reports an annual salary of $14,020; the average reported for part-time councils that pay a salary is $5,244.
To measure staffing, we use responses to a question that asked municipal clerks “Does the council employ staff to work exclusively on council business?” Approximately 84% answered yes, and, as with salary, we create a dichotomous measure coded 1 if a municipality employs staff for council business and 0 if they do not. A separate question asks respondents from cities with staff the number of full and part time staff assigned to the council. The average (mean) response was 3.8 full time staff and 2.6 part-time staff.
Given the operations of the typical municipal council, we rely on a question that asks clerks to indicate “how often does the council formally meet, excluding work sessions” with response options for “more than once a week” (.23%), once a week (3%), three times a month (2%), twice a month (59%), once a month (34%), less than once a month (1%) or other (1%). To provide consistency across our measures, we convert these responses into a dichotomous measure. Municipalities that meet more than once a month are coded 1, and those that meet less than once a month are coded 0.
We then combine the three dichotomous indicators from the salary, staffing, and session questions into one scale ranging from 0-3. We label the resulting categories “citizen” (0), “hybrid-citizen (1), “hybrid-professional” (2), and professional (3).
The distribution of cities across the local government professionalism category is summarized in the table below.
Figure 1. Distribution of Professionalism Among Sample Cities
Source: Authors’ analysis of 2018 ICMA Form of Government Survey Data
As the figure suggests, the majority of municipalities fall in the “hybrid-professional category with “hybrid-citizen” occupying the next largest number of municipalities, and “professional” and “citizen” describing the smallest number of cases. City and town councils in America should not be characterized as professional, nor should they be discounted as unprofessional, citizen legislatures. Instead, they are best described as legislatures in transition—neither home to well-resourced, full-time politicians, nor populated by people whose labor in office is a minor time commitment best understood as service.
Conclusion and Looking Forward
Local legislatures are not, on average, poorly resourced institutions that are staffed by citizen legislatures, nor are they professional bodies more akin to Congress. Instead, much like state legislatures, they tend to fall somewhere in the middle, with most municipalities taking on some characteristics of each type. In the end, we hope this measure will help scholars and practitioners of urban politics better understand how institutional structures, like professionalism affect outcomes.
Read the full UAR article here.
References
DeSantis, Victor S., and Tari Renner. 2002. “City Government Structure: An Attempt at
Clarification.” State and Local Government Review 34(2): 95-104.
Grissom, Jason A., and James R. Harrington. 2013. "Local Legislative Professionalism." American
Politics Research 41(1): 76-98.
Harden, Jeffrey J. 2013. “Multidimensional Responsiveness: The Determinants of Legislators'
Representational Priorities.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 38(2): 155-184.
Kousser, Thad. 2005. Term Limits and the Dismantling of State Legislative Professionalism. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Squire, Peverill. 2017. “A Squire Index Update.” State Politics and Policy Quarterly 17(4): 361-371.
Tausanovitch, Chris, and Christopher Warshaw. 2014. “Representation in Municipal Government.”
American Political Science Review 108: 605-641.
Woods, Neal D., and Michael Baranowski. 2006. “Legislative Professionalism and Influence on State
Agencies: The Effects of Resources and Careerism.” Legislative Studies Quarterly 31(4): 585-609.
Christopher A. Cooper is Madison Distinguished Professor and Director of the Haire Public Policy Institute at Western Carolina University. His research on state and local politics, elections, and southern politics has appeared in a variety of outlets including Political Research Quarterly, Public Administration Review, State Politics and Policy Quarterly, and State and Local Government Review.
Heather Rimes is an Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Public Affairs program in the Department of Political Science and Public Affairs at Western Carolina University. Her research examines public and nonprofit sector management and leadership and has been published in the Review of Public Personnel Administration, Research Policy, Nonprofit Management and Leadership, and VOLUNTAS, among others.