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 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

A House for All Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Chicago 1890–1936

This book assesses the role of urban ethnic groups, particularly in terms of the rise of the Democratic Party to national predominance between 1928 and 1932. It builds quantitative and qualitative models for the study of ethnic groups in terms of political behavior. Focusing clearly upon political change and the role of ethnicity, the work advances the hypothesis that Chicago’s ethnic groups responded as ethnic groups, rather than on socio-economic or other bases, when they shifted their party allegiances in the late twenties. This ethnic realignment was a major factor in the redistribution of power between parties in Chicago. Employing a variety of quantitative measures and a number of conceptual tools from the social sciences, Allswang has utilized simple statistical procedures with clarity and discrimination. His statistical data is based on thorough research in unpublished census material and election returns. His qualitative data is based in part on a comprehensive examination of the foreign language press, supplemented by materials from other newspapers, personal interviews, and manuscript sources. The book studies nine ethnic groups over a generation of political development, affording insights into urban politics and history, and into dominant-minority and interethnic relations in politics and in the city. Crisp in style, thorough, methodologically innovative, A House for All Peoples will become a model for studies of United States political history. John M. Allswang is assistant professor of history at California State College in Los Angeles.https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_political_science_american_politics/1006/thumbnail.jp

Explaining Institutional Change: Why Elected Politicians Implement Direct Democracy

In existing models of direct democratic institutions, the median voter benefits, but representative politicians are harmed since their policy choices can be overridden. This is a puzzle, since representative politicians were instrumental in creating these institutions. I build a model of direct democracy that explains why a representative might benefit from tying his or her own hands in this way. The key features are (1) that voters are uncertain about their representative's preferences; (2) that direct and representative elections are complementary ways for voters to control outcomes. The model shows that some politicians benefit from the introduction of direct democracy, since they are more likely to survive representative elections: direct democracy credibly prevents politicians from realising extreme outcomes. Historical evidence from the introduction of the initiative, referendum and recall in America broadly supports the theory, which also explains two empirical results that have puzzled scholars: legislators are trusted less, but reelected more, in US states with direct democracy. I conclude by discussing the potential for incomplete information and signaling models to improve our understanding of institutional change more generally