Towards a Measure of Local Legislative Professionalism

Municipal policy leadership is shared between managers, city councilors, and mayors, all of whom vary in institutional power and resources across municipalities. Corresponding with their importance, scholars have established consistent measures of professionalism for Mayors and City Managers. Unfortunately, there is no parallel measure of professionalism for city councils. After reviewing the role of councils in local policy leadership and establishing the need for a systematic measure of local legislative professionalism, this paper uses data from over 4,000 municipalities to develop a measure of legislative professionalism for city councils. We demonstrate that considerable variation exists in levels of professionalism among local legislatures and describe the implications of this variation for questions of municipal policy leadership and local legislative representation.