Political Machines

Abstract

A political machine has generally been defined as a party organization that draws much of its support from patronage jobs, government contracts, and other ‘spoils’ of office. During the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, almost every large and medium-sized city in the United States was run by one or more political machines. Machine-like organizations also exist in a number of Third World and developing nations. The growth and survival of political machines in American cities has been explained in a number of ways: as a way of counteracting the formal dispersion of power in city government and thus making cities more governable; as a way of helping to meet the economic needs of the urban poor, especially European immigrants; and as a response to the immigrants' political culture. The classic big-city machine declined in the two decades after World War II and has now all but disappeared from the landscape of American urban politics. Today, machines are important principally for historical reasons, and because many of the institutions of contemporary city government were originally designed as ways of undermining the power of the machines.