Machine Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Machine politics refer s to politics in which votes are exchanged for discrete benefits. Under machine politics, voting is driven by a direct exchange between voter and political candidate rather than by opinion or ideology. (Hence, the term machine politics is related but not equivalent to political machine. The latter is a generic term for a tight political organization and does not specify its mechanism of mobilization; machine politics refers thus to a specific type of political machine.)

While machine politics was common in American cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the two most famous examples were Tammany Hall in New York (from the 1790s to the 1960s) and the Cook County Democratic Central Committee in Chicago (from the 1930s to the 1970s). In some settings, machine politics has been substituted by patronage that relies no longer on voters through the distribution of welfare and payroll but rather on corporate interests through the distribution of contracts and favorable policies—a form of exchange also known as pinstripe patronage.

The term machine politics is typically deployed for analysis of U.S. cases, yet the phenomenon of machine politics is found also in other countries: Central and South America, southern Italy, and Japan offer especially rich literatures. The term commonly adopted to signify the phenomenon of machine politics in the comparative context is clientelism. However, clientelism is different from machine politics in two important respects. First, it is more specific than machine politics, because it focuses on a dyadic exchange (i.e., an exchange between two individuals), while machine politics can involve dyadic or collective exchange. Second, clientelism is more generic than machine politics, because the latter limits the exchange to votes for political office, while clientelism includes social exchange in realms outside of politics. Thus, the term political clientelism is a better equivalent to machine politics.

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