In this Book
- Bosses, Machines, and Urban Voters
- Book
- 2019
- Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
- Funder: Mellon/NEH / Hopkins Open Publishing: Encore Editions
- Program:
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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.
Table of Contents


- Half Title
- pp. i-ii
- Title Page
- p. iii
- Dedication
- pp. v-vi
- Preface to the 1986 Edition
- pp. ix-xii
- Half Title 1
- pp. 1-2
- 5. Richard J. Daley: The Last Boss?
- pp. 117-147
- 6. Black Cities, White Machines
- pp. 148-162
- Epilogue: Of Bosses and Bossing
- pp. 163-168
- For Further Reading
- pp. 169-170
Additional Information
ISBN
9781421429915
Related ISBN(s)
9780801833120, 9780801833236, 9781421430324, 9781421430737
MARC Record
OCLC
1120076791
Pages
188
Launched on MUSE
2019-09-20
Language
English
Open Access
Yes
Creative Commons
CC-BY-NC-ND