Black Voters and Machine Politics in Chicago: the Social Capital Effect.

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 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]