CITY COUNCIL LEGISLATIVE COMMITTEES AND POLICY-MAKING IN LARGE UNITED-STATES CITIES

Theory: Legislative committees are extensive and integral to the struc ture and policy-making functions of Congress and state legislatures. S cant research exists on current roles of committees of city councils. Hypotheses: We hypothesize that city council committee systems are les s common and not as vital to policy-making than is true of other legis lative bodies. Contrary to much urban research, we further expect that city government structure, not the political environment, shapes deve lopment of committee systems and their policy roles. Methods: Logistic and OLS regression are the methods used to analyze the structure of c ity council committee systems. Differences in policy outputs are analy zed with t-tests and OLS regression. Data are from a 1992-93 mail surv ey of 160 large United States cities, and from Census Bureau reports o n city government finances. Results: Committees are widely used in lar ge cities and their use is directly due to structural aspects of city government, particularly size of city council. Broad policy-making rol es are found to be uncommon, but a substantial part of city legislativ e business is assigned to committees. Legislative committees have a sm all impact on policy outputs.