Demand for Professionalism Among Elected Officials: Evidence from a Survey of Local Government Officials

This paper examines the demand side of public administration professionalism, focusing on city legislators’ preferences for professional administrators. To this point, most of the research on managerial professionalism has emphasized the supply side, or why managers seek professional advancement or professionalism. This paper examines the factors that drive political decision-makers to prefer professionalized city managers. In the manuscript, we explore how familiarity with the International City/County Management Association (ICMA), financial conditions, and population size influence preferences for professionally credentialed administrators. Specifically, we investigate how these factors and their interactions influence legislator preferences for ICMA-credentialed administrators. We investigate the question of demand for professionalism through an original survey of 500 local government elected officials. We find that elected officials with higher levels of familiarity with ICMA were more likely to prefer ICMA-credentialed managers. Additionally, we find a significant preference for ICMA-credentialed administrators in financially strained governments, when legislators are familiar with the ICMA organization.