The Northampton City Council will have four new members on inauguration day in January 2010. Together with the incumbents they will select a new council President who will decide the composition of Council subcommittees. As well some new committees might be formed in the city, like a Charter Comission for instance. Currently the Council is formulating a committee to address the possible city purchase of the Bean Farm property in Florence and recently a new Rezoning Committee was formed to examine the city's zoning policies comprehensively.
So, how does membership on a local board or committee come about? The following represents one such view as promulgated by an academic.
John R. Baker is a professor of political science at Wittenberg University and codirector of the International City/County Management Association-Wittenberg Local Government Management Internship Program. Below is a link to a research article published in 2006, "Recruitment to Boards and Commissions in Small Cities."
Some excerpts (references removed):
Specifically, the article presents and tests a model of the factors that distinguish self-recruited board members from board members who have been asked by others to serve. The results suggest that both individual and contextual factors are predictive of self recruitment behavior and that the context within which small-town boards operate influences citizen recruitment.
Previous research has identified five selective incentives: material, solidary, purposive, developmental, and service that have been important to the decisions of volunteers to engage in civic and political life.
Building on these findings, another line of research has suggested that certain volunteers are motivated out of a sense of “pessimism about others’ collective action.” The idea is that conflict, dissatisfaction, and mutual suspicion may prompt citizens to volunteer.
Citizens may be motivated to participate or volunteer but may be constrained by their own abilities or the characteristics of the recruitment networks that favor certain individuals over others. Given these basic assumptions, Verba, Schlozman, and Brady articulate a comprehensive model of “civic voluntarism” by positing three variables that are critical to citizen participation: resources (e.g., time, money, and civic skills); psychological engagement; and mobilization.
Recent research on social capital has strongly emphasized the importance of understanding the degree to which institutional structures and cultural contexts help create and shape social capital, with a particular focus on the role of government.
These theoretical notions should also pertain to recruitment to small-town boards and commissions. This study therefore proposes that recruitment is affected by individual factors and is a sociopolitical process that is to a large extent contextually determined.
Most cities have some form of official recruitment process through which interested and available citizens can apply as potential members of various boards and commissions. Quite often though, citizens have to be coaxed to serve or informally recruited by city leaders and/or current board members because of the general reluctance among small-town leaders to voluntarily serve—particularly when some form of expertise is needed on the board or commission. For example, many cities require that their Planning Commission members include someone from the real estate profession. For these reasons, recruitment is usually a process of city leaders or board members identifying individuals with the appropriate sets of skills and convincing them to serve on the board. In these cases, the application process becomes a mere formality. In other cases, however, individuals may self-identify.
The results indicate that three-quarters of responding small-town board members were asked to serve by someone else; the remaining quarter can be classified as having self-recruited. Specifically, 49.3 percent of the respondents reported being recruited by the mayor or city council, 13.7 percent were recruited by other board or commission members, and 9 percent were recruited by city staff members. Another 2.1 percent indicated they ere recruited in some other way not represented by the response alternatives given.
A key assumption of this research is that smalltown board members are motivated by one or more selective incentives that they believe will accrue as a result of serving on their board. These incentives include material, solidary, purposive, developmental, and service benefits. Material incentives are tangible rewards such as money, the opportunity to advance politically, or the opportunity to make professional contacts. Solidary incentives are intangible rewards resulting from socializing, friendship, or the feeling of belonging to a group. Purposive incentives are largely intangible payoffs that result from working toward “something one believes in.” Developmental and service incentives, according to Widmer are intangible benefits. Developmental incentives refer to the ability to assume civic responsibilities or to use or acquire knowledge. Service incentives include fulfilling a sense of civic obligation.
Verba, Schlozman, and Brady demonstrate that resources, psychological engagement, and mobilization account for civic voluntarism and, taken together, help determine citizens’ capacity for engaging in civic life. Their notion of psychological engagement dovetails with the concept of motivation, or the idea that citizens must want to engage. However, their theory more comprehensively underscores the basic point that choices to volunteer are fundamentally constrained by individual resources and the characteristics of the recruitment network.
Another theoretical assumption that applies to small-town board recruitment is what Brady, Schlozman, and Verba refer to as “rational prospecting” for volunteers on the part of recruiters. Recruiters, whether they be current board members, the mayor, city staff members, or city council members, are likely to seek to minimize their search costs and therefore contact potential board members who are most likely to agree to serve. Additionally, given the closed, fairly homogeneous nature of small-town social networks, volunteers who are asked to serve tend to have at least some “weak ties” to recruiters and probably are most likely to have strong ties by being “embedded” in the community’s social network. Those who are not motivated by selective incentives to self-recruit (termed “reluctants” by Barber) must be asked to serve. If those doing the asking are indeed “rational prospectors,” then a potential volunteer’s ties to the social network becomes a critical piece of information that is used by recruiters in this prospecting process. According to Brady, Schlozman, and Verba, recruiters want to know about the past activity of potential recruits and the kinds of resources they possess.
Rational-prospecting recruiters are careful to ask individuals with the appropriate types of expertise to serve on particular boards.
With regard to resources, “reluctants” who have more of the kinds of resources that make it easier to volunteer (e.g., money, civic skills, and time) are more likely to be asked to serve by recruiters. Measures of each of these three key resources were included to further operationalize the concept of capacity. Individuals with higher socioeconomic status may have more opportunities to acquire civic skills because they can afford them. Thus, to measure these dimensions of resources, respondents were asked to indicate on an ordinal scale their household income and personal education levels. After assigning the midpoints of each range to the respondents based on their reported categories, these two items were then added together to create an index of socioeconomic status. The associated hypothesis is that individuals with higher socioeconomic status are more likely to be asked to serve.
A person’s age has been shown to be related to the acquisition of civic skills as a resource or participation. Moreover, age may correlate with how closely tied an individual is to a small town’s social network, particularly if the person has lived in the community for quite some time. Hence, because older respondents may have acquired more skills and established themselves in a community compared with younger respondents, they are more likely to be asked to serve by recruiters.
In short, the more “civic” the culture, the more self-recruitment may be expected.
Economists have consistently documented the effects of income diversity on the creation of social capital and have found that more homogenous cities are characterized by higher stocks of social capital. Oliver found in his study of political participation and the economic characteristics of metropolitan suburban communities that there is greater participation in more economically diverse cities due to increased competition for public goods. Because all of the cities in this study are small, they tend to be significantly homogenous compared with larger communities. However, there is still variation between them. Hence, drawing on these general findings about the effects of diversity, it is hypothesized that respondents from more economically diverse communities are more likely to self-recruit as a result of the greater likelihood that they are more weakly tied to their community’s social networks.
In their arguments about the importance of contextual factors to the creation of social capital, Maloney, Smith, and Stoker discuss the importance of formal institutional factors such as the degree of decentralization of government and coherence in public administration and the degree to which more formal requirements are imposed by government for involvement in activities that help create social capital. From their perspective, then, the more decentralized the government, the less coherent the administration. Further, the less formal the requirements for participation, the more likely social capital will be created. These characteristics of the local governmental context should also affect city board recruitment; that is, with a more centralized and formalized recruitment process, board members are less likely to self-recruit.
Type of government should also affect recruitment. City manager cities typically tend to be more formalized and professionalized in terms of the board recruitment process, particularly in small cities. It might be expected, then, that citizens would be less likely to self-recruit in city manager cities. However, city managers often become lightening rods for political controversy. Because of their tendency to insist on more professional and merit-based public policies and shun politics as usual, city managers often are criticized by citizens who disagree with the way in which city affairs are handled, which in turn motivates citizens. On the other hand, in small towns that have mayor-council forms of government, there tends to be less of a belief on the part of citizens that their public affairs are being wrongly attended to, in large part because the mayor is perceived as “one of them.” This anecdotal evidence suggests that there may be more self-recruited board members in city manager cities and that citizens in mayor-council cities may wait to be asked to serve by someone else. Moreover, in small city–manager cities, mayors and council members tend to be less active in tasks such as board recruitment, which may present greater opportunities for self-selection. Hence, type of government was used as a dummy variable. It is hypothesized that board members are more likely to self-recruit in small towns that have city managers.
Please see PDF link below for full discussion on the findings.
Conclusion (in its entirety)
Boards and commissions in small cities have important duties to perform in their communities. Although most of them perform an advisory function for city councils, they are often at the forefront of controversy in the matters that come before them. This study contributes to understanding the importance of these entities by presenting a model of board recruitment to explain and predict the variation in the ways in which citizens come to volunteer for board service. The results demonstrate that both individual and contextual factors are significant predictors of board service and underscore that the context in which recruitment takes place cannot be ignored if this process is to be explained. The results have important practical implications for small-town political leaders who are interested in designing or changing their recruitment procedures. If diversity of viewpoints is an important goal in recruitment, reformers need to be cognizant of the powerful role that is played by the social network. Those citizens who are embedded in the network, as measured by years of residence, are significantly more likely to be asked to serve compared with those who are not. If rational prospecting recruiters are to identify more “weakly tied” citizens as potential board members, they must be willing to pay increased search costs. That board members in city manager cities are significantly more likely to self recruit may be due to the typically more formal and professional procedures that city managers put into place or to a certain level of angst that is generated in small towns by “outsider” city managers. Further research beyond the scope of this study is needed to identify the exact causes of the increased level of self-recruitment that seems to be present in small city–manager cities.
Previous research uncovering the importance of selective incentives as explanations of citizen activism is strongly supported by this study. For the most part, serving on a board in a small city is an underappreciated task. Those who do volunteer, however, seem to perceive that certain benefits, mostly intangible, can be accrued as a result of their service. Thus, small-town officials who wish to attract quality recruits to their boards might want to offer certain material benefits to increase the pool of potential board members. On the other hand, the findings suggest that city leaders may want to highlight the intangible benefits available to citizen volunteers through service on a city board or commission, especially in an era of tight budgets, when nonmaterial incentives may be all that cities can afford to offer.
The findings suggest other interpretations. For example, it may be significant to the policy process to distinguish between embedded recruits and self-selected recruits in terms of the final outcomes on decisions that are taken by city councils, even though these entities function primarily in an advisory capacity. Moreover, council members may be more likely to overturn advice coming from boards that are composed of a large number of self recruits who are less closely connected to a small town’s social network. Further research examining the policy roles of these boards and commissions is needed to illuminate the nature of small-town politics in America.
