POLITICAL SCIENCE 422

FIRST MIDTERM EXAMINATION–Written Component

Instructions: Please put your answers to all of the exam’s 10 written questions into one file, and submit it by 11:59PM (one minute before midnight) on Wednesday, October 6, to the Turnitin link posted under Assignments on Blackboard. Please make sure to do your responses in order, and number them so that we know which question you are answering. Please do NOT include the text of the questions in the file you submit, only the question numbers of the questions as you answer them. Each of the 10 questions is worth up to 10 points, so the whole exam is worth 100 points total. Your response should require no more than 4-5 single-spaced pages at maximum. You should not need to cite any sources other than the lectures, Levine text, and Blackboard readings. Please do make sure to indicate when you are quoting from any source, whether from in the class resources or outside them, and make sure to provide full citations for any sources you use that are not included in the class syllabus.

1. What role did positive and negative reform play in killing the urban political machines?
2. Is it entirely coincidental that gentrification has been moving poor and black residents out of cities just in time for white members of the creative class to globalize them? Explain.
3. How has the transportation revolution affected your personal experiences with commuting between home and work and the university?
4. Please comment on the way that Los Angeles’s experience with machine politics and political reform seems not to have harmed the city’s economic growth trajectory.
5. Please discuss the impact of the transportation revolution on the size of cities.
6. Please analyze George W. Plunkitt’s distinction between “honest” and “dishonest” graft.
7. How does the anti-urban ethos contrast with the urban sweepstakes in which Richard Wade tells us America’s frontier cities competed in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries?
8. What does Richard Schragger mean by the city as process? Please explain briefly.
9. How does Robert Merton think political machines served latent functions for American urban areas? Please compare Merton’s romantic account of the machine to Royko’s critical analysis of Daley’s Chicago.
10. Please discuss Sam Bass Warner’s account of early Philadelphia’s water issues and how that connects with his privatism thesis.