Since 1932 elections and decision making in Chicago have been dominated by the Regular Democratic Organization of Cook County, led for a quarter of a century by the late Mayor Richard J. Daley. The extraordinary longevity of this Democratic machine provides the basis for this penetrating investigation into the nature of machine politics and grassroots party organization.

For three years, Thomas M. Guterbock participated in the daily activities of the Regular Democratic Organization in one North Side Chicago ward in order to discover how political machines win the support of the urban electorate. Guterbock's participant observation data, supplemented by a sample survey of ward residents' attitudes toward, and contacts with the machine, provide convincing evidence that the most widely accepted notions of how political machines work are no longer correct.

Contrary to conventional wisdom about the machine, Guterbock finds that the party does not secure votes by doing "favors" for people, nor do services rendered determine actual voting behavior. Instead, party loyalty is governed by such factors as social status, educational achievement, and bureaucratic competence. Guterbock finds that Democratic loyalists are drawn disproportionately from the ward's lowest strata. Ironically, the characteristics of these loyal Democrats contrast sharpely with the characteristics of those most likely to use party services.

What keeps the machine going, then? To answer this question, Guterbock takes us behind the scenes for a unique look inside the ward club. He shows how members develop loyalty and motivation beyond concern for their own pocketbooks. And he analyzes the public involvement of machine politicians in neighborhood affairs, describing the skillful—sometimes devious—ways in which they appeal to their constituents' sense of community. By focusing on the interplay of party loyalty and community attachments, Guterbock is able to explain the continued hegemony of Chicago's political machine and its enduring image of legitimacy.

"The Madisonian Turn is an outstanding assessment of the functioning of democratic institutions in the Nordic countries. If democracy is in trouble in Scandinavia, then it is surely facing problems everywhere, so the book will be read carefully by those concerned about contemporary governance in all modern democracies."
---Michael Gallagher, Trinity College, Dublin

"This welcome and timely re-evaluation of Nordic politics constitutes a major contribution to comparative government, and is likely to stand as the definitive treatment of politics in the region for many years to come."
---Peter Mair, European University Institute

"This book is unique in its comparative scope and the wealth of information on the state of parliamentary democracy in the Nordic countries. It is particularly useful for the comparativists who do not come from these countries, because the original literature which it covers in detail is often not accessible for the English-speaking audience."
---Hanspeter Kriesi, University of Zurich

"The strength of The Madisonian Turn is to interface detailed empirical evidence on the dynamics of democratic politics in Scandinavia with an elaboration and test of rival theories of change in the politics of postindustrial democracies. This book is an inspiration for students of Northern Europe, but also for scholars of comparative legislatures and political parties more generally."
---Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University

Parliamentary democracy is the most common regime type in the contemporary political world, but the quality of governance depends on effective parliamentary oversight and strong political parties. Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden have traditionally been strongholds of parliamentary democracy. In recent years, however, critics have suggested that new challenges such as weakened popular attachment, the advent of cartel parties, the judicialization of politics, and European integration have threatened the institutions of parliamentary democracy in the Nordic region.

This volume examines these claims and their implications. The authors find that the Nordic states have moved away from their previous resemblance to a Westminster model toward a form of parliamentary democracy with more separation-of-powers features---a Madisonian model. These features are evident both in vertical power relations (e.g., relations with the European Union) and horizontal ones (e.g., increasingly independent courts and central banks). Yet these developments are far from uniform and demonstrate that there may be different responses to the political challenges faced by contemporary Western democracies.

Torbjörn Bergman is Professor of Political Science at Umeå University, Sweden.

Kaare Strøm is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Jacket Credit: Heidi Hobde Dailey

Most research on two-party elections has considered the outcome as a single, dichotomous event: either one or the other party wins. In this groundbreaking book, James Fowler and Oleg Smirnov investigate not just who wins, but by how much, and they marshal compelling evidence that mandates-in the form of margin of victory-matter. Using theoretical models, computer simulation, carefully designed experiments, and empirical data, the authors show that after an election the policy positions of both parties move in the direction preferred by the winning party-and they move even more if the victory is large. In addition, Fowler and Smirnov not only show that the divergence between the policy positions of the parties is greatest when the previous election was close, but also that policy positions are further influenced by electoral volatility and ideological polarization.

This pioneering book will be of particular interest to political scientists, game theoreticians, and other scholars who study voting behavior and its short-term and long-range effects on public policy.

Most of the earlier studies on the Indonesian political party, Golkar, tend to view the organization solely as an electoral machine used by the military to legitimize its power. However, this study is different in that it considers Golkar less an electoral machine and more as a political organization which inherited the political traditions of the nominal Muslim parties and the Javanese governing elite pre-1965, before the inauguration of Indonesia’s New Order. Golkar, then, is seen in this book as nominal Islam with a military element that tends to differentiate it from previous political parties in the country.

Leo Suryadinata traces the birth, struggle, and emergence of this party so closely identified with Indonesia’s President Suharto. Yet, to claim that Suharto and the military dominate the party is to view Golkar superficially, for the party is also composed of factions of civil servants and the Minister of Security and Defense, as well as several other governmental agencies. A complex and well-detailed cultural history of Indonesia’s most powerful political party, this case study should have wider implications for the study of military behavior in the Third World.

Are political parties the weak link in Indonesia’s young democracy? More pointedly, do they form a giant cartel to suck patronage resources from the state? Indonesian commentators almost invariably brand the country’s parties as corrupt, self-absorbed, an