Question

1. Why would someone who is registered with a particular political party choose to vote differently in a local election?

2. How do city councils in larger cities model their organization off of Congress?

Answer 1

1.

Your state may give you the opportunity to declare your political party affiliation on your voter registration card.

You do not have to vote for the party you’re registered with, in a federal, state, or local general election.

But in a presidential primary or caucus, depending on your state’s rules, you may have to vote for the political party you’ve registered with.

2.

Legislative committees are extensive and integral to the structure and policy-making functions of Congress and state legislatures. Scant research exists on current roles of committees of city councils. We hypothesize that city council committee systems are less common and not as vital to policy-making than is true of other legislative bodies. Contrary to much urban research, we further expect that city government structure, not the political environment, shapes development of committee systems and their policy roles. Logistic and OLS regression are the methods used to analyze the structure of city council committee systems. Differences in policy outputs are analyzed with t-tests and OLS regression. Data are from a 1992-93 mail survey of 160 large United States cities, and from Census Bureau reports on city government finances. Committees are widely used in large cities and their use is directly due to structural aspects of city government, particularly size of city council. Broad policy-making roles are found to be uncommon, but a substantial part of city legislative business is assigned to committees. Legislative committees have a small impact on policy outputs.