Definition
Contracts — the day-to-day government purchase orders for construction, insurance, legal services, materials, and consulting — are the most reliable engine of political patronage in any administrative state. Whoever decides who gets paid can compel loyalty without ever appearing on a ballot.
The Power Broker shows Robert Moses using contracts the way a chess player uses pawns: steered to law firms whose partners sat on the right committees, to engineering houses whose principals could lobby Albany, to insurance brokers whose commissions financed the right campaigns. Every dollar of construction spent in the open generated a smaller, quieter dollar of political capital.
Why it matters
How it works
A contracting system can be corrupted at many points: in the writing of the bid specification (favoring one bidder's strengths), in the prequalification of bidders (excluding inconvenient ones), in the awarding of low-visibility no-bid work (insurance, legal, bond counsel), and in the post-award change orders that ratchet up the price after the bid is decided. None of these requires an envelope of cash.
The general lesson is that a public-works machine is, structurally, a contracting machine. Anyone who wants to understand who controls a city should read its contract awards before its election results. Moses understood this earlier than most of his peers and acted on it with no apparent ethical hesitation.