BoholAnalysis

(The essay below is published recently in A Revista Conexao Politica, published by the Universidade Federal do Piauí in Brazil. The essay was translated into Portuguese and is published in both English and Portoguese courtesy of my friend, Prof. Batista.  As the essay looks into politics and voter behaviour, I find it apt to put it here at Boholanalysis.) Introduction Some countries in the world may have buried machine politics and the predominant role of bosses in defining local governance as matters of nostalgia (Stone, 1996). But undoubtedly, this is not necessarily the case in developing countries which seem to be poor reflections of the colourful past of advanced democracies.   Machine politics and bosses still thrive in these environments where there is widespread insecurity and poverty and where on the hands of politician, rather than the state, rests the relative power and means to appease these conditions (Hedman and Sidel, 2000). What happens to machine pol