The great days of the party machine are probably long gone in modern liberal democracies, but it may well become a feature of states in the process of democratic transition. A classic example of the 19th and early 20th centuries is the Democratic Party machine in the US city of Chicago, which continued to be very influential in the city’s politics until the 1960s. A ‘party machine’ implies a highly efficient group of party activists, some at least fulltime paid party agents, who organize the vote of the party faithful and deliver it reliably to candidates approved by the party leaders. Clearly there has to be some incentive for voters loyally to follow the instructions of their party organizers (typically the party ‘precinct captain’ in the major US cities). The big US machines thrived on the mass immigration of the Industrial Revolution. Thousands of European immigrants would arrive in the cities to be met by the party workers who would help organize their accommodation and jobs in return for political support. As the machines became established, their control over patronage, ensuring the control of thousands of civil-service employees in the city governments, helped further ensure their power.
Ultimately it became impossible to have a political career without the support of the leading party officials who inevitably demanded favours, either personal, or in terms of legislative and executive decisions made by those they arranged to have elected.
Once a city administration was controlled by nominees of the party, there was little to stop it from increasing its power. Anyone who wanted a licence to run a bar, sell newspapers, or almost anything else would end up owing the party loyalty. A very similar process occurred in Italy in the post-1945 period when internal immigration from the south provided supporters either for the Communist Party or the Christian Democrats in the northern industrial centres. In fact the Christian Democrat party machine was equally strong in the south, sometimes acting extremely crudely. (A notorious example involves a mayor of Naples who distributed left-foot shoes to poor, potential voters before an election, with the matching right shoes not to be delivered until after the election, should he win.) Party machines depend on an ignorant and economically vulnerable population and on the possibility, through a patronage system, of political control of civil-service appointments. All three factors have largely disappeared from modern political systems.
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