Jacksonian democracy

Jacksonian democracy, also known as Jacksonianism, was a 19th-century political ideology in the United States that restructured a number of federal institutions. Originating with the seventh U.S. president, Andrew Jackson and his supporters, it became the nation's dominant political worldview for a generation. The term itself was in active use by the 1830s.

This era, called the Jacksonian Era or Second Party System by historians and political scientists, lasted roughly from Jackson's 1828 presidential election 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. It emerged when the long-dominant Democratic-Republican Party became factionalized around the 1824 presidential election. Jackson's supporters began to form the modern Democratic Party. His political rivals John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay created the National Republican Party, which would afterward combine with other anti-Jackson political groups to form the Whig Party.

Broadly speaking, the era was characterized by a democratic spirit. It built upon Jackson's equal political policy, subsequent to ending what he termed a monopoly of government by elites. Even before the Jacksonian era began, suffrage had been extended to a majority of white male adult citizens, a result which the Jacksonians celebrated. Jacksonian democracy also promoted the strength of the presidency and the executive branch at the expense of Congress, while also seeking to broaden the public's participation in government. The Jacksonians demanded elected, not appointed, judges and rewrote many state constitutions to reflect the new values. In national terms, they favored geographical expansionism, justifying it in terms 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 "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 also little to no improvement, 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.

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.

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:

equal protection of the laws; an aversion to a moneyed aristocracy, exclusive privileges, and monopolies, and a predilection for the common man; majority rule; and the welfare of the community over the individual.