Definition
Reform is the recurring American political tradition that organizes against the accumulated abuses of an entrenched political organization — a machine, a party, a bureaucracy — and attempts to replace its operating principles with merit-based hiring, transparent budgeting, and competitive elections. Reform movements are cyclical: they win an election, install changes, and recede when the machine adapts or the public's attention moves on.
In The Power Broker every American generation produces a reform wave. Each delivers something durable (the civil-service exam, the secret ballot, financial disclosure) and leaves something undone, which the next generation must take up.
Why it matters
How it works
A reform movement begins when a scandal makes the existing order's costs visible enough to mobilize otherwise inattentive voters. It builds a coalition out of newspapers, civic associations, professional societies, and disaffected machine outsiders, runs a candidate as an outsider, and wins an election or referendum.
The movement's harder task begins after victory: install procedural changes that survive the political moment. Civil-service exams, independent commissions, financial disclosure, and competitive bidding all originate in reform victories. The reformer's tragedy is that running a city requires the same patronage tools the reform was supposed to abolish — which is why Moses, schooled by reformers, ended his career running a patronage machine of his own.