Bosses, Machines, and Urban Voters

Originally published in 1986. Political machines, and the bosses who ran them, are largely a relic of the nineteenth century. A prominent feature in nineteenth-century urban politics, political machines mobilized urban voters by providing services in exchange for voters' support of a party or c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Allswang, John M. (auth)
Format: Electronic Book Chapter
Language:English
Published: Johns Hopkins University Press 2019
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Summary:Originally published in 1986. Political machines, and the bosses who ran them, are largely a relic of the nineteenth century. A prominent feature in nineteenth-century urban politics, political machines mobilized urban voters by providing services in exchange for voters' support of a party or candidate. Allswang examines four machines and five urban bosses over the course of a century. He argues that efforts to extract a meaningful general theory from the American experience of political machines are difficult given the particularity of each city's history. A city's composition largely determined the character of its political machines. Furthermore, while political machines are often regarded as nondemocratic and corrupt, Allswang discusses the strengths of the urban machine approach-chief among those being its ability to organize voters around specific issues.
Physical Description:1 electronic resource (188 p.)
ISBN:book.67889
9781421429915
Access:Open Access