Previous accounts of the determinants of women's service on city councils focused on the degree of women's representation. In this paper we suggest that understanding women's representation on these legislative bodies requires that attention also be paid to potential differences between communities where women have been able to break the cycle of exclusion from those where they have not. This paper compares two different measures of women's council representation using both logit and the OLS regression. The results indicate that, alone, electoral structure is not a significant explanatory factor in understanding either the presence of women on city councils or the extent of women's representation on these legislative bodies. However, the size of the legislative body has a significant effect which, except among district election cities, largely improves the likelihood of electing a woman to the council (as compared to improving the degree of women's representation). Other results indicate significant regional disparities which favor the Midwest and West over the Northeast and South. The past three decades witnessed a gradual integration of women into policymaking positions in local government in the United States. As women's role in governance at the local level continues to expand, so has the torrent of literature exploring the correlates of women's officeholding in city politics (cf.In the typical account on the determinants of women's service on city councils since the 1980s, the percentage of council seats occupied by women is regressed on electoral structure and other ecological factors. Within this framework, analysts continue to make pronouncements about the factors NOTE: We wish to thank Anne L. Schneider and Alvin Mushkatal for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

The authors use black and Hispanic representation on city councils to address the proposition that the size of an elective body is related to minority officeholding in that body. A conceptual framework of the nature of minority representation and the types of differences that council size can make are examined using national survey data for 525 cities. The results support the position that council size does not explain the strength of minority representation but that larger councils provide a greater opportunity for minority incumbency. This effect is strongest in at-large election cities. For blacks, the strongest effect is found for at-large election cities in the South.

We use survey data from a national probability sample of 6,593 adult Afghans and multivariate regression that estimates the effects of several factors on separate indices of gender role attitudes generated by exploratory factor analysis to explore whether men and women differ in their gender role attitudes and the extent to which ecological and socio-demographic factors may mediate both within-and across-group differences. We find that men and women differ in their gender role attitudes, as men report more conservative attitudes than women. These differences manifest whether gender role attitude is measured as procuring basic rights for women, or empowering women politically. Moreover, men and women's gender role attitudes are not immutable-education, ethnicity, and urbanization and, in women's case, generational replacement-all act to mediate these differences. The profile of the Afghan man who would hold liberal gender role attitudes is an educated urbanite, non-Sunni or nonPashtun, who believes in the compatibility of democracy and Islam, trusts outsiders, has exposure to the formal media, and would extend equal rights to all irrespective of gender, religion, or ethnicity. That of the woman is of a younger, educated urbanite, non-Pashtun, who believes in the compatibility of democracy and Islam, trusts outsiders, has exposure to the formal media, and would extend equal rights to all regardless of gender, religion, or ethnicity.

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