NCJ Number
96196
Date Published
1985
Length
28 pages
Annotation
This analysis of political corruption and machine politics focuses on election fraud, illegal zoning, nondisclosure of economic interests, and conflicts of interest by elected officials in small cities dominated by political machines and one or two powerful industries.
Abstract
An important inducement to political corruption over the last 100 years has been machine-style politics. Corrupt cities seem to have their own cycles of official misconduct bound to patterns of historical development. As cities grow in size, political corruption becomes more specialized. Small cities dominated by one or two powerful business corporations and notable families often are conceived by their corporate and familial founders in self-protection. The main political cleavage in such cities is often over the quality, pace, and style of development. When industrial out-migration occurs, open political control by dominant corporations is passed to local politicians who tend to come from notable families and business backgrounds. For the small elite groups who run these machine cities, there is some pleasure in seeing 'dirty' industry leave and new development come in. To maintain their dominance, such machines embark on a political course where municipal boundaries of closet size create opportunities for organized crimes like election fraud, illegal zoning, nondisclosure by public officials of their economic interests, and felony conflicts of interest. Under the present value system, the rewards for going after organized crime, particularly political corruption, are not as great as those received for mounting campaigns against street crime. Tabular data and 39 references are listed.