Bosses, Machines, and Urban Voters (Revised) Revised Edition Contributor(s): Allswang, John M. (Author) |
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ISBN: 1421430320 ISBN-13: 9781421430324 Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press OUR PRICE: $30.40 Product Type: Paperback Published: December 2019 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Political Science | American Government - State - History | United States - General |
Dewey: 320.809 |
Physical Information: 0.6" H x 5.9" W x 8.9" (0.60 lbs) 188 pages |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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. |