Survey of City Council Members in Large American Cities, 1982 (ICPSR 8655)

Principal Investigator(s): Welch, Susan; Bledsoe, Timothy

Summary: This datafile consists of the responses to a mail questionnaire sent to randomly selected city council members in large American cities. The study was designed to explore the relationship between local political structure and the personal characteristics, representational styles, and policy perspectives of city council members. The respondents were asked questions about a broad variety of topics, such as factors influencing their decision to run for council, perceptions of sources ... (more info)

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Welch, Susan, and Timothy Bledsoe. SURVEY OF CITY COUNCIL MEMBERS IN LARGE AMERICAN CITIES, 1982. Susan Welch, University of Nebraska, and Timothy Bledsoe, University of South Carolina [producers], 1982. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2007-03-05. doi:10.3886/ICPSR08655.v1

Persistent URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR08655.v1

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This survey was funded by:

• National Science Foundation (8218189)

Summary:   This datafile consists of the responses to a mail questionnaire sent to randomly selected city council members in large American cities. The study was designed to explore the relationship between local political structure and the personal characteristics, representational styles, and policy perspectives of city council members. The respondents were asked questions about a broad variety of topics, such as factors influencing their decision to run for council, perceptions of sources of conflict within the council and community, the political structure of their city, and perceptions of how well they represent the variety of constituencies within the community. Background information, such as age, sex, political party, principal occupation, and highest level of education attained is also provided on each survey respondent.

Subject Terms:   cities, community elites, community power, demographic characteristics, governing councils, governmental elites, leadership, local government, local politics, political elites, political party preference, representation, United States

Universe:   City Council members in large American cities with populations between 50,000 and 1,000,000.

Data Types:   survey data

Data Collection Notes:

In order to preserve the confidentility of respondents, certain variables have been omitted from the datafile and codebook.

Sample:   Stratified random sample.

Data Source:

direct mail survey

Original ICPSR Release:  1988-01-06

Version History:

• 2007-03-05 SAS, SPSS, and Stata setup files have been added to this data collection.

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