The First Elections: The Rise of Electoral Democracy in the Early American Republic

In this groundbreaking and comprehensive look at Congressional elections in pre-Jacksonian America, Jay K.Dow examines the origins of our modern electoral politics. When did the United States become a recognizably modern republic?The traditional understanding is that elections in the Age of Jackson introduced institutionalized political parties, campaigning, partisanship, position-taking, stump speeches, high elector turnout, and other familiar features of electoral democracy.Before that, so the story goes, elections were less organized along party lines, often uncompetitive, and frequently dominated by elites rather than average citizens.The First Elections offers a compelling alternative to this interpretation of the early American republic. Through systematic analysis of an impressive new collection of early American election returns known as A New Nation Votes, Jay K.Dow has discovered what these results tell us about the development of Congressional elections between 1796 and 1825