14
professionalization makes it more likely that the council will be better organized. To
account for this possibility, I include variables to account for part-time city councils, as
well as the presence or absence of council staffs.
Other Factors
Other factors that do not have as strong a theoretical foundation, but may
nevertheless influence local governance structure might include city population, size of
the city budget, region, and political ideology. I therefore control for all these factors in
the model below.
9
Table 2 reports the results of a logit model explaining the dichotomous city-level
variable “most council business is conducted in committees”. Included in the analysis are
the various institutional, budgetary, demographic, and state-level factors discussed above.
I calculate robust standard errors to account for possible non-independence of cities
located within the same states.
9
City population comes from the 1990 U.S. Census; and city budget from the 1992 Census of
Governments. To control for political ideology I use the state liberalism scores generated by Erikson,
Wright and McIver in their work. See ERIKSON WRIGHT MCIVER_____
Convention