Machine Politics, Police Corruption, and the Persistence of Vote Fraud: The Case of the Louisville, Kentucky, Election of 1905

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy A. Campbell

Although vote fraud is an acknowledged component of American political culture, scholarship on the inner workings of stealing elections is rather thin. Despite popular exposés by nineteenth-century muckrakers, the functioning dynamics of vote stealing remains somewhere beneath the visible layer of political analysis. The Gilded Age has been the recipient of some extensive studies of ballot corruption, but scholars have generally concluded that the extent of fraud in changing the actual outcome of a specific race was exaggerated, and with the advent of the Australian, or secret, ballot in the early 1890s, American elections took on a decidedly freer and fairer tone. The scholarship surrounding vote fraud has also tended to focus on a secondary issue: Did the secret ballot diminish fraud to the point where earlier turnout levels could be seen as inflated? Following the lead of Walter Dean Burnham, numerous scholars have answered decidedly in the negative—the level of fraud was so insignificant as not to change turnout totals in any meaningful way.

2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 174
Author(s):  
Carla Wilson Buss

Anyone seeking reliable information on American political life since the 1970s will be pleased with Michael Shally-Jensen’s work, American Political Culture. This three-volume set covers topics from abortion to Israel Zangwill, the nineteenth-century author who coined the phrase “melting pot” and who appears in the entry for “Cultural Pluralism.”


Author(s):  
А.А. CHEMSHIT ◽  
О.S. STATSENKO

A political analysis of the Ukrainian state project is being carried out. The idea of state insufficiency of modern Ukraine stands out as the starting point. The analysis shows that for a quarter of a century Ukraine has not been able to overcome any of the crisis stages: identity, penetration, legality, participation and distribution, and in the strict sense has not acquired the obligatory signs of statehood. The authors trace the dynamics of the socioeconomic and humanitarianpolitical problems of an irreversible character or, otherwise, systemic degradation of the society. They point out to the shadowing of the economy, deindustrialization of the country, the demographic collapse, the crisis of the educational system, total corruption, formation of a carnival political culture and moral degradation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Scott Travanion Connors

Abstract This article explores the emergence of reformist sentiment and political culture in Madras in the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it contributes to, and expands upon, the growing body of literature on colonial petitioning through a case-study of a mass petition demanding education reform. Signed in 1839 by 70,000 subjects from across the Madras presidency, the petition demanded the creation of a university that would qualify western-educated Indians to gain employment in the high public offices of the East India Company. Through an analysis of the lifecycle of this education petition, from its creation to its reception and the subsequent adoption of its demands by the Company government at Fort St George, this article charts the process by which an emergent, politicized public engaged with, and critiqued, the colonial state. Finally, it examines the transformative effect that the practice of mass petitioning had on established modes of political activism and communication between an authoritarian colonial state and the society it governed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
David Ress

Controversy over the expansion of pound netting in the largest US fisheries of the late nineteenth century marked an early conflict between those who considered fisheries a commons and those who sought to establish property rights in a fishery. Pound-netters physically staked out a specific part of the sea for their exclusive use, and their conception of their property rights resulted in significant overfishing of important food – and oil – fish species. Here, just as with the commons that many economists argue inevitably result in over-exploitation of a resource, regulation was rebuffed and the fisheries collapsed.


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