Nonpartisan slating groups are organizations that recruit, nominate, finance, and campaign on behalf of a slate of candidates in a system of effective nonpartisanship. This article analyzes the interests of those who established and operated these slating groups. Examining the origins, success, and bases of electoral support of these groups revealed that in contemporary city politics, they long served to institutionalize further the upper and middle class, and white ethnic and racial biases of the Municipal Reform Movement of the Progressive Era. As such, slating-group domination of city electoral politics worked to the systematic disadvantage of disfavored minorities.
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