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.
Patronage , Groups and Pivotal Voting
In contrast to traditional approaches to patronage politics, in which politicians directly buy electoral support from individuals, we examine how parties can elicit wide spread electoral support by o¤ering to allocate benets to the group giving it the most support. Provided that the party can observe group level voting, this mechanism, which eliminates the need to observe individual votes or to reward a large number of individual voters, incentivizes voters to support a party even when the party enacts policies which are against their interests. When a party allocates rewards contingent upon group-level voting results, voters can be pivotal both in terms of a¤ecting who wins the election and in inuencing which group gets the benets. The latter (prize pivotalness) dominates the former (outcome pivotalness), particular once a patronage party is anticipated to win. By characterizing voting equilibria in such a framework we explain the rationale for the support of patronage parties, voter turnout and the endogenous political polarization of groups. An earlier related paper was presented at the PEDI meeting in Portland OR, June 18-19, 2009 and at the NYU political economy seminar, November 13, 2009. We thank these audiences and Jon Eguia, Dimitri Landa, Jorge Gallego and John Patty for their helpful comments.
Crime seriousness scales: Public perception and feedback to criminal justice policymakers
Abstract Findings from the National Survey of Crime Severity, the largest survey ever conducted of how the general public in the United States ranks the seriousness of a variety of offenses, are compared with the offense severity index used by the U.S. Parole Commission as one component of its decisionmaking guidelines. This comparison illustrates a practical method for using survey research to provide feedback to criminal justice policymakers. The necessity of distinguishing between harm and culpability, when examining the concept of “offense seriousness” in the context of sentencing policy, is then discussed.