Jacksonian democracy (or Jacksonianism) was a 19th-century American political ideology centered on expanding the political power of the “common man,” opposing entrenched elites, and asserting popular control over government. Associated with Andrew Jackson and his supporters, it combined majoritarianism, democratic participation, expansion of the right to vote to non-landowning white men, hostility to concentrated economic power (such as national banks), a strong executive willing to act on behalf of the people, and an emphasis on equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. It became the nation's dominant political worldview for a generation during the 1830s. Historians and political scientists sometimes call this era the Jacksonian Era or Second Party System.
Jacksonianism emerged from the factionalization of the long-dominant Democratic-Republican Party around the 1824 presidential election, but it was also part of a broader democratic transformation already underway in American politics. Even before Jackson’s rise, suffrage had been extended to a majority of white male adult citizens, a development Jacksonians celebrated and interpreted as the end of what Jackson called a monopoly of government by elites. Jackson’s supporters organized this democratic spirit into what became the modern Democratic Party, while his political rivals John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay formed the National Republican Party, which later combined with other anti-Jackson groups to create the Whig Party. The Jacksonian movement sought to broaden public participation in government by demanding elected rather than appointed judges and by rewriting many state constitutions to reflect these new values. At the same time, it strengthened the presidency and the executive branch at the expense of Congress, presenting the president as the direct representative of the popular will. In national terms, Jacksonian democracy also favored geographical expansionism, justified through the language of manifest destiny.
Jackson's expansion of democracy was exclusively limited to white men, as well as voting rights in the nation were extended to adult white males only, and, according to historian Edward Pessen, "it is a myth that most obstacles to the suffrage were removed only after the emergence of Andrew Jackson and his party. Well before Jackson's election most states had lifted most restrictions on the suffrage for white male citizens or taxpayers."
There was little to no improvement to, and in many cases a reduction of, the rights of non-white U.S citizens during the extensive period of Jacksonian democracy, spanning from 1829 to 1860. As the nation expanded westward, this racial boundary made the question of slavery increasingly unavoidable, exposing a core tension within Jacksonian politics. Consequently, the Jacksonian Era lasted roughly until the practice of slavery became the dominant issue with the passage of the Kansas–Nebraska Act in 1854 and the political repercussions of the American Civil War dramatically reshaped American politics.
Etymology
In its earliest usage, the phrase "Jacksonian democracy" had a narrower meaning referring to the Democratic Party, particularly as led by Andrew Jackson, who was president of the United States from 1829 to 1837. American historian James Schouler called Jackson's political alliance "the Jackson Democracy" in his 1889 History of the United States Under the Constitution, and in 1890 future president Theodore Roosevelt called the antebellum Democratic Party "the Jacksonian Democracy". Later historians, including Frederick Jackson Turner and William MacDonald, generalized the phrase "Jacksonian democracy" to describe democracy writ large in the United States and what they saw as the influence of the American frontier on the character of American political culture. In the 1945 book The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. influentially reinterpreted "Jacksonian Democracy" as a phenomenon of labor struggle against business power rather than of frontier regional influence.
General principles
In 1999, historian Robert V. Remini stated that Jacksonian Democracy involved the belief that the people are sovereign, that their will is absolute and that the majority rules.
William S. Belko, in 2015, summarized "the core concepts underlying Jacksonian Democracy" as: