Coordinating the machine: subnational political context and the effectiveness of machine politics

Political machines use state resources to win elections in many developing democracies and electoral autocracies. Recent research has noted that the coordination of machine politics can be much more complex and problem-prone than previously thought. Yet, the role that the subnational political context plays in solving these coordination problems has largely been neglected in the comparative literature. This article seeks to fill this gap and suggests that control over the local administration is an important variable that shapes the effectiveness of authoritarian machine politics. We exploit the great institutional and political variation within one of the most prominent electoral authoritarian regimes of today, the Russian Federation, to test the empirical implications of the theory with detailed local level electoral and socio-economic data as well as multilevel regression models. The empirical results highlight the importance of subnational political structures in supporting electoral authoritarian regimes.

Emerging policy responses in shrinking cities: Shifting policy agendas to align with growth machine politics

This paper examines growth machine politics operating in shrinking cities. Instead of de-growth politics logics emerging in shrinking cities, the paper finds, through an empirical study of Zonguldak, a shrinking mining city in Turkey, a politics that is better described as another variant of growth machine politics. Invigorated by the difficulties encountered in the implementation of state-driven growth agendas, and the subsequent reactions of local stakeholders, Zonguldak’s emerging policy agenda maintains a distance from the discourse of growth and instead adopts such themes as ecology, industrial heritage, quality of life and liveability when reframing and deploying a variety of conventional practices to make the city attractive for investment. In so doing, a broad coalition of diverse local interests are effectively brought together, and this paper suggests that these dynamics characterise a politics that is better described as adaptive response to align with growth machine politics. To explore this, the paper builds on an exploratory research design that complements secondary and documentary data analysis of the city’s economic and population trends and key policy and planning documents with an analysis of unstructured interviews with local policy makers and focus groups with local stakeholders.

Arvey’s Balancing Act

This chapter turns to Jacob Arvey. More than anyone else in Jewish Chicago, it fell to him to negotiate the political sea change from the crude saloon-style politicking of Manny Abrahams, through the gangster-riddled days of Morris Eller, to the efficient Machine politics of the middle 1940s. Arvey came to personal power in a ward where it was often difficult to distinguish the politicians from the gangsters, and he could never entirely free his political apparatus from connections to organized crime. At the same time, however, he found a space between the corruption that preceded him and the impossible-to-achieve purity that reformers from outside his world clamored for. Arvey established that middle ground between crime and reform by building relationships. Some of those hands were relatively clean, but others were dirty enough that he could not entirely remove the stain they left behind.

Rising in the Ranks

This chapter shows how the political machine’s links to gangsters became increasingly liabilities in the case of Benjamin Zuckerman. The nature of Chicago’s machine politics was changing as the coalition that founded it matured and its members grew comfortable in their established offices. With senators and governors to elect, it did not help to be seen as attached to professional gamblers and thugs. At the same time, the confederation model of crime was giving way to the corporate one. As such, starting in the late 1930s, Zuckerman’s clubs began to be raided with more regularity, and there was evidence of his losing some of his standing. By the time Anixter died in 1943, Zuckerman was negotiating a new equation for securing his own standing.