Collective Action,City Council Committees,and State Aid to Cities

Studies of city council committee structures offer the potential to shed light both on the dynamics of local politics and on broader theories of legislative organization. Pelissero and Krebs (1997) find that larger councils are more likely to have committee structures and that committees have limited influence on policy outputs, contrary to what distributive models of legislative organization would predict. The author replicates Pelissero and Krebs’s finding on council size but suggests a different interpretation of these results, focusing not on theories of distributive politics but on the collective action dynamics within city councils. Instead of being havens for high-demanding legislators, city council committees are tools with which a council as a whole can more effectively provide collective goods to its city. Finally, the author presents a simple test of whether councils with committees are better able to provide public goods, using state aid as the dependent variable.