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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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interest in the question of how social capital relates to economic and political development has become something of a scholarly fixation in the last ten years. While the concept has generated much debate, surprisingly few people have questioned the basic proposition that social capital is the key to developing strong institutions, particularly in poor communities. It is frequently argued that organizations must strive to harness whatever "positive" social capital exists in the area in which they work and strengthen it in order to bring about long-term changes. In this paper I argue something different. Namely, I propose that the existence of social capitalâ?”defined as an investment of resources in social relationships with the expectation of a return to that investmentâ?”can be a barrier to collective action and institutional change. In other words, the more individuals in a community invest in social capital, the more they become inclined toward social, political, and economic conservatism as a means of protecting their investments. Accordingly, I propose that it is only through the destruction or obsolescence of preexisting social capitalâ?”through either exogenous shocks or endogenous entrepreneurshipâ?”that meaningful change can be realized. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]