The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall
The first complete history of America's most bizarre and longest-running political act. Stories of chicanery and finagling and rigged elections abound in this look at a bygone era in American politics.
Prizes, Groups and Pivotal Voting in a Poisson Voting Game
We model elections between two parties in a Poisson random population of voters (Myerson 1998, 2000). In addition to offering different policy benefits, parties offer contingent prizes to those identifiable groups of voters that offer the highest level of political support. In large populations, voters are only likely to influence the electoral outcome when the vote share between two parties is perfectly equal and even then their influence on the outcome is small. In contrast voters retain significant influence over the distribution of prizes even in lopsided elections. Equilibrium behavior is driven by voters competing to win preferential treatment for their group and not by policy concerns. The results address variance in turnout in elections, political rewards and the persistence of dominant parties even when they are popularly perceived as inferior.
PLEASURE, POWER, AND THE PURSUIT OF COMMUNISM: SOVIET YOUTH AND STATE-SPONSORED POPULAR CULTURE DURING THE EARLY COLD WAR, 1945-1968
art, with certain students accused of “showing political immaturity, failing to understand the Party’s positions on art.” This episode constituted part of a broader crackdown on abstract art by the Khrushchev administration from late 1962, precipitated the the Soviet leader’s derision of such art forms in December 1962 at the Manege exhibit. Such instances demonstrate the limitations of the top-level promotion of youth grassroots initiative, as the Khrushchev leadership reigned in youth autonomy when it threatened to go beyond the boundaries of the permissible. The dates cited above have particular resonance, since both 1957-58 and 1962-63 represent two periods when those at the top of the Party hierarchy moved away from pursuing a more pluralistic, tolerant policy course, due to anxiety inspired by both sharpening Cold War hostilities and domestic developments. In these periods, official rhetoric censured what it labeled as 639 TsAOPIM, f. 635, op. 13, d. 546, ll. 56-57. This is likely related to criticism of the Party associated with the fallout from the Secret Speech and the Hungary invasion. For more, see Polly Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin: Real and Ideal Responses to De-Stalinization,” in Jones ed., The Dilemmas, 41-63. 640 TsAOPIM, f. 6083, op. 1, d. 52, ll. 166-67. 641 Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manege Affair Revisited,” Kritika 6.4 (Fall 2005): 673716. 642 On these anxieties, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 156-88.