ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the roll call voting of Chicago aldermen to uncover the basic nature of the political struggle that characterized each political regime. It focuses on election results and the voting behavior of aldermen relative to the policy preferences of the mayor. Histograms and factor analyses provide the empirical criteria that have guided the author classification of Chicago city councils. Beyond both histograms and factors analysis, he use roll call votes to help locate key clashes in the city council. For each year of roll call vote data, he develop a histogram reporting the frequency of aldermanic voting for the mayor's proposals and conduct a principal components factor analysis, using varimax rotation to uncover the number and size of stable voting blocs within each council. He then compares the histograms to a factor analysis of the same voting patterns.
