Corruption in Cities: Graft and Politics in American Cities at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

The essay is an exploration of corruption as practiced by city politicians in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Corruption is generally considered to be bad for the performance of governments and for the growth and development of economies, but American cities grew rapidly and were, as far as tangible evidence suggests, relatively well governed. I propose the answer to this conundrum lies in the exact types of graft which were possible. Skimming from city contracts and manipulating local real estate markets encouraged politicians to pursue growth enhancing policies. Many of the most damaging forms of government interference - closing borders and pursuing input-substituting policies - are not possible in cities. Patronage politics made corruption more likely by insulating politicians from (some) voter wrath, but the ability of the tax base to depart the city provided some constraints on rent-extraction. The city Boss did not want to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. The analysis of urban graft is based on contemporary reports, especially the very detailed reports in Shame of the Cities' by Lincoln Steffens. The analysis also answers other important questions raised by the experience of Progressive Era cities: Why did businessmen back reform? And why did machine politics rise, and fall, between 1890 and 1930?

The Effect of Patronage Politics on City Government in American Cities, 1900-1910

In this paper I explore the effect of patronage or machine' politics on government performance in American cities during the Progressive era. I use game theoretic models and an empirical analysis of spending and public goods provision during the first decade of the twentieth century in a cross section of American cities with and without governments dominated by political machines. The ability to buy votes relaxes the electoral constraints on the government. Taxes, budgets, municipal wages, and (unobserved) corruption are all predicted to rise under a patronage based regime. But in a city, patronage politics does not relax the incentives to provide public goods. A politician who buys his way into office will still be motivated to provide optimal levels of government goods and services because he can capture the resulting locational rents in higher taxes and graft. Empirically, city governments dominated by political machines paid city government employees more and had larger budgets but provided high levels of public goods.

Interactions Between Charged Rods Near Salty Surfaces

Using both theoretical modeling and computer simulations we study a model system for DNA interactions in the vicinity of charged membranes. We focus on the polarization of the mobile charges in the membranes due to the nearby charged rods (DNA) and the resulting screening of their fields and inter-rod interactions. We find, both within a Debye-Huckel model and in Brownian dynamics simulations, that the confinement of the mobile charges to the surface leads to a qualitative reduction in their ability to screen the charged rods to the degree that the fields and resulting interactions are not finite-ranged as in systems including a bulk salt concentration, but rather decay algebraically and the screening effect is more like an effective increase in the multipole moment of the charged rod

Charge Fluctuations on Membrane Surfaces in Water

We generalize the predictions for attractions between over-all neutral surfaces induced by charge fluctuations/correlations to non-uniform systems that include dielectric discontinuities, as is the case for mixed charged lipid membranes in an aqueous solution. We show that the induced interactions depend in a non-trivial way on the dielectric constants of membrane and water and show different scaling with distance depending on these properties. The generality of the calculations also allows us to predict under which dielectric conditions the interaction will change sign and become repulsive