Allocating patronage: party organization and electoral competition in Gilded Age America

Why did party organizations differ so dramatically across the United States during the Gilded Age? Existing scholarship answers this question by classifying party organizations into distinct types, including urban machines, insurance-based organizations and Southern skeleton parties. While these archetypes describe important variations in party organization, they do not fully explain why these different organizational forms emerged. The authors argue that party organizations are better understood as the result of party managers allocating a scarce organizational resource – patronage – across competing organizational uses under different electoral conditions. Patronage could be used to mobilize voters, recruit high-quality candidates, or generate organizational revenue, but the finite number of appointments forced party managers to make tradeoffs among these competing uses. The authors argue that variation in electoral competition systematically altered the optimal allocation of patronage and that the familiar organizational archetypes identified in the literature represent different equilibria generated by these changing incentives. The authors derive a series of propositions and conclude by outlining directions for future empirical research.