• Finish handing back the proposal evaluations
• Let students know that lectures will be available on line. My web address is http://polisci.osu.edu/grads/block/.   I do not have a name on the grad student home page directory yet, but my page is there.

Students should Take out a half sheet of paper and answer the following questions:

1. Tell me anything significant about what happened in Somerset, PA.
2. Tell me anything significant that is going on in Cheshire, OH
3. Tell me anything you remember about Federalism.
4. Tell me anything you remember about Devolution.
5. Tell me anything you remember about machine politics.

Overlap from the last class discussion:
 

• In the last class, we talked about political machines and the characteristics of machine politics.  Among the many things discussed, we emphasized the following:
• Immigration patterns (generally)
• The relationship between immigration patterns and political machines
• Machine politics (generally)
• Characteristics of political machines
• What causes political machines?
• Why do machines persist today?

• One of the reasons why it is important to understand machine politics is because the Reformist Movement was reactive to machines.  In other words, you cannot understand reformism without understanding machine politics.  In this class, we will talk more about the reform movement, focusing on the following areas:
• What are reform politics?
• The social and class bias of reform politics
• The three key characteristics of the reform political system
• The subsequent effects of the reform movement on voter registration

• Each of the authors from this week’s readings takes different positions on the effectiveness of reform politics, Bridges seems to endorse the reform movement while Hays is more suspicious of reform.

The Reform Movement:

• Grew out of loss of power by traditional white economic and social elites.
• Call for politics that serve public interest

• Stressed economy and efficiency
1. Public interest should be served
2. Politics should be separate from administration
3. Experienced administrators should be hired to deal with technical problems
4. Scientific management principles should be applied to local government.
5. Proposed a merit system in civil service, where "cooperative" and resource affluent neighborhoods got most attention..

• Reformers switched bias of local government to class based bias.  Most reformers were middle or upper middle class professionals and business owners—wanted to take government $ away from growing working/immigrant classes
• 2 types of reform movement:
1. Social reformers: visions of progressive social reform and extension of public services to aid needy.
2. Structural reformers:  centered in city’s conservative business elite, wanted to restructure local government so as to ensure their interest and diminish the influence of the working and immigrant classes.
• It has been found that reformed cities:
• Spend and tax less,
• Are less responsive to socioeconomic cleavages in its political decision-making
• Work against lower class citizens, and less representative of these groups

1. City manager
2. At-large elections
3. Non-partisan elections

1. City Manager:

• Civil Service model of city government
• City planning commissions:  nonpolitical professionals, non-representative-outside electoral realm
• Ushered in the growth of bureaucratic power—unaccountable, new machines

• Now, governments are moving towards a middle ground, with a mixture of features—allowing district elections, more mayoral appointments, and governmental decentralization while maintaining the necessary responsiveness to the electorate, keeping civil service for citizens, and retaining the “city manager” style of city leadership.
• Pros: Such a mixture is supposed to clean up elections, fairness of city jobs, less corruption, brought in technical competence.
• Cons: Lessened power of minorities/working class, weakened city leadership, strengthens city bureaucracy

• Legal dispute of districting/intent to discriminate
• Lower voter turnout
• In the South, 2/3-3/4 of the cities had at-large elections
• This resulted in higher levels of voter disinterest and incomplete ballots.

• Took place in 3/4 of post-reform cities
• In most cases, there existed a, “sometimes still active, but concealed” party system
• Voters are confused (no party tickets to rely on)
• Ethnic voting by names (w/out party, many people voted race/ethnicity/gender)
• More class biased, only upper/middle classes turnout
• Issue avoidance (issue-claiming was traditionally an artifact of a party system)
• Makes coalition building with strong alliances difficult (discussion of brand name car as an analogy for party type)

The Effects of Reform Measures on Voter Registration:

• The need to register before voting.  This was a big deterrent
• Now they have “motor/voter” where you have to register to vote when to get identification or license from DMV.
• Direct Primary
• Allows electorate to choose their candidate
• Increase in bias because of biased class participation rates
• Initiative, Referendum, Recall
• Initiative = citizen initiated, referendum-council initiated, recall-removal
• Initiative, controversial, $ bias, lack of foresight, no deliberation—federalist #10
• Can go either way, open debate to new issues, or provide means for very conservative specialized interest policies.

• Andrew White’s essay, “City Affairs are Not Political” sets the tone and summarizes succinctly what reformist “rhetoric” is all about:
1. Cities should be run like businesses.
2. City affairs should be non-partisan

• The “reformist rhetoric” suggests that making it so that city government had nothing to do with politics would make cities less corrupt, more efficient, more professional, and ultimately more democratic.  Amy Bridges show how successful Southwestern (sunbelt) cities were at employing reform governments.  Her argument is fairly simple:
1. Southwestern cities had to contend with special geographic issues (i.e. droughts, floods, earthquakes, etc.).
2. Business leaders and civic elites in Southwestern cities believed that, in order for their cities to prosper, they had to take control over municipal affairs.
3. Once in control, these firm bosses and elites, created city-states—they developing ports and harbors, railroads, and offering citizens public services and utilities that brought appeal to the city.
4. In fact, city “boosters” did an excellent job of “selling the city to outside investors and even lobbying Congress for assistance in their economic growth.

• Bridges is a positive record of the success of reform politics in the Southwest.  Therefore, she buys into the reformist rhetoric of the “goodness” of the reform movement.  However, implied in this reform message is the idea that the working class, immigrant masses were unfit to run the city.  Samuel Hays argues:
1. Reformers claimed that they were removing corruption out of municipal government, but, in reality, businesses and rich people (the main proponents of reform) really only wanted to get ethnic officials out of office so that they could advance their own interests.
2. Reform politics, therefore, simply traded one form of corruption and political exclusion for another.