TY  - JOUR
AU  - Menes,Rebecca
TI  - The Effect of Patronage Politics on City Government in American Cities, 1900-1910
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 6975
PY  - 1999
Y2  - February 1999
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6975
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w6975.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Rebecca Menes
419 S. Lee Street
Alexandria, VA 22314
Tel: 703/836-3641
Fax: NA
E-Mail: becky@menes.us
AB  - In this paper I explore the effect of patronage or  machine' politics on government performance in American cities during the Progressive era. I use game theoretic models and an empirical analysis of spending and public goods provision during the first decade of the twentieth century in a cross section of American cities with and without governments dominated by political machines. The ability to buy votes relaxes the electoral constraints on the government. Taxes, budgets, municipal wages, and (unobserved) corruption are all predicted to rise under a patronage based regime. But in a city, patronage politics does not relax the incentives to provide public goods. A politician who buys his way into office will still be motivated to provide optimal levels of government goods and services because he can capture the resulting locational rents in higher taxes and graft. Empirically, city governments dominated by political machines paid city government employees more and had larger budgets but provided high levels of public goods.
ER  -