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In the study of the relationship between blacks and machine politics in Chicago, a watershed event was the shift in the late 1940s of lower-income black voter support from the Republican to the Democratic machine. To most scholars this realignment does not present a puzzle. It is assumed that, lacking financial and political resources and sense of efficacy, these voters were simply an easy target for the Democratic Party. This paper instead argues that when lower-income blacks in the city are seen as purposeful actors in the political and social areas of their lives, a more complicated story emerges. Indeed, a careful examination of the habits of lower-income blacks in Chicago from the 30s onward reveals that participation in machine politics was part of a larger tendency to engage in sophisticated, forward-looking, and long-term minded social capital investment. Participation in machine politics is usually considered through an examination of either economic or social motivations. In contrast, the novel social capital approach provided hereâ€"grounded in an economically rigorous and individualistic frameworkâ€"provides a way of integrating the social and economic to achieve a more nuanced understanding of motivation and action. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that, contrary to popular perceptions of the concept, investments in social capital generally present a barrier to collective action aimed at institutional change. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I suggest that debates about the relative success of development organizations and the associated the concept of "bridging" social capital can be linked and be enriched by insights from the literature on interest groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]