The Operation And Survival Of American Urban Political Machine

From Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt, North American society is in a transition. After the suffrage was largely expanded, urban politics developed with new characteristics based on the common people as a response to the industrialization, urbanization and most important elements-immigrations. Local politics, special interests, ethnic voting, and popular electioneering were emerging afterwards and became mainstream of the political life of New York. Tammany Hall, as the most influential faction inside the Democratic Party, was very competitive in elections and it held in New York municipal power for almost 70 years due to its effective organization. Then it was called "political machine".This paper attempts to analysis the logic of how Tammany Hall operated and survived in politics. By literature review and collection of historical data, the author tries to use the "Selectorate" Theory and introduce 4 terms as "selectorate", "nominal winning coalition", "key backer" and "loyalty norm" to explain 3 main questions:1) How did Tammany Hall operate; 2) Why reformers couldn’t get re-elected; 3) What was wrong with Tammany Hall after it joined progressive reformers. And hope to give a view from within the organization.The full text is divided into 3 parts, namely introduction, body and conclusion. The introduction begins with a brief prescription of the background when Tammany Hall was transformed into a political machine. And then reviews and discusses the results of this field, both at home and abroad, sums up the value and shortcomings of their research. At last, give an account of "Selectorate" theory.The body consists of 3 chapters, each responding to the 3 questions already mentioned above:1) The general principle of how political machine operates is to establish a bloc-voting group by a few key backers. Then it would form a large nominal winning coalition out of selectorate to win elections. The political machine affording its key backers generous private awards, including office holding, grey income and secret information and so on. Also, by providing immigrations jobs, protection from the law, and various welfare activities, the political machine came to forge a patronage relationship with minority voters. This is how political leadership was based on mass partisan loyalty and securing its political survival.2) Reformers could not get re-elected because they relied more on issue politics, which was very unstable. And when they came to power, the public policy they made was not consistent with the short-term expectation of the people. Also, they refused to allocate public resources to their campaign allies. While Tammany Hall was more practical, they build a personal and material link between individual voters and district leaders. Reformers are un-trained amateurs while Tammany men are experienced professional politicians. Their advantage lies in the organization itself.3) Tammany Hall declined not for it resisted to reform, but for joining it. This is due to the original patronage system of Tammany Hall was replaced by public welfare policies. The former system took care of individual needs while the new one meet the demand of the population. It weakens but only personal links between Tammany Hall and its voters but also the loyalty norms. Since the public welfare policy is not exclusive, voters could hardly be excluded. In addition, resources was quite limited and the increase of public goods means the decrease of private rewards, which threatened the interest of key backers and made it difficult to gather a winning coalition. Tammany Hall lost its foundation as a political machine.The conclusion part recalls Tammany Hall’s logic of operation and survival under selectorate theory. Also, combined with Satori’s party theory and the conception of ethnic politics, this part tries to give more dimensions of the reasons why Tammany Hall declined.