'By any means necessary': The American welfare state and machine politics in Newark's North Ward

Urban sociology has recently recognized the important function that local institutions serve in poor neighborhoods via their role as arbiters between community members and the outside world. These institutions provide crucial services, they serve as centers for social interaction, and they often dictate the range of resources that are available for a community. Local political organizations are no exception. Throughout American urban history, political organizations were critical in shaping the political and economic opportunities available to people living in poor communities, whether it was by working hard to incorporate waves of new immigrants, working behind the scenes to exclude other groups, or using their clout to levy goods and services for their constituents.;The same is true today, yet contemporary social science has paid little attention to how these organizations work, how and why they might differ from their historical predecessors, or what these differences might mean for how resources get distributed within and across poor communities. This work revives attention to the local political organization by focusing on a contemporary adaptation of one of America's oldest political institutions---the machine organization. In particular, I examine the partnership of machine organizations with nonprofit community-based organizations (or "CBOs") in an institutional arrangement that I call a "machine-CBO.";I draw on data from an ethnographic case study of a machine-CBO in the North Ward of Newark, New Jersey to examine how local political organizations structure political and economic opportunities in poor communities and how, in turn, these organizations are structured by changes both within and beyond the community. I show, for instance, that by orchestrating electoral turnout and mobilizing a committed cadre of workers on its behalf, political organizations can decide democratic outcomes in their communities. By controlling patronage, they can determine who can and cannot access public jobs. And by partnering with local CBOs, political organizations can shape the quantity of public and private dollars that flow into a community and how those dollars translate into economic and educational opportunities. They are thus a fundamental component of the social structure in many communities.;In turn, party organizations are also shaped and constrained by pressures within the neighborhood, like demographic change, and far beyond the neighborhood, like social welfare policy. My work demonstrates the steps taken by political organizations to adapt to these changes. For instance, I demonstrate how changes in federal welfare policy during the 1960s and 1970s opened the door for local political organizations to partner with nonprofit organizations as a means of making inroads in the community. Politicians who successfully adapted to these transformations in the welfare state by partnering with a nonprofit CBO may have actually sown the seeds of success for generations to come. I also highlight the specific ways that partnering with a CBO can help a political organization manage ethnic turnover, changes in the availability of patronage, and a critical public sphere.;I conclude by asking whether the machine-CBO is a more equitable institution than the traditional machine organization, whether it changes our conclusions about the capacity of machine organizations to serve as engines of redistribution in poor communities, and how we should think about the machine-CBO in light of more macro changes in the American political and economic climate.