What Makes a Good Local Leader?
Evidence from U.S. Mayors and City Managers
ABSTRACT
What are the traits of a good local leader? While most studies of local officials focus on the mayors of large cities, 85% of municipalities in the United States have a population of less than 20,000. We conduct in-depth phone interviews with nearly 300 mayors and city managers from predominantly small and mid-sized cities in
the United States to learn about their backgrounds. We focus on two standard ability measures (education and prior occupation) and draw from research in public administration and economics to introduce two new dimensions of quality: public service motivation and managerial skill. We paint a comprehensive descriptive portrait of the respondents in our sample and the cities they represent, and we then examine whether these traits matter for the policy goals that local leaders choose to focus on during their time in office. These results offer a promising new approach for researchers studying political leadership and its consequences, both in the local context and beyond.
In the first half of this paper, we paint a detailed descriptive portrait of the respondents in our sample to understand how local leaders compare on both these old and new dimensions of ability across cities. For example, we find evidence that U.S. mayors and city managers are more well-educated and come from more prestigious occupations than the general U.S. public. We also find that managerial skill correlates strongly with years of education and occupational prestige, but public service motivation appears to be a distinct dimension of leadership.
If larger or wealthier cities are more likely to select highly qualified leaders — or if those leaders are able to be more effective in those places — the political selection process might perpetuate or even exacerbate local inequality across communities. We find that more affluent cities with higher median home values and more educated residents are more likely to select mayors or managers with higher educational attainment and more prestigious occupational backgrounds.
At the same time, larger cities tend to select leaders who score more highly in terms of managerial skill, and left-leaning cities are more likely to select leaders with higher levels of public service motivation.
Nevertheless, given the large body of extant research on educational attainment and occupational prestige, we begin by examining how the leaders in our sample compare on these dimensions with both Members of Congress and the general public. We then draw from literature in public administration and economics to introduce two additional measures that tap into the notion of quality: public service motivation and managerial competence. Perry and Wise (1990) define public service motivation as an individual’s “predisposition to respond to motives grounded primarily or uniquely in public institutions”.
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