Jacksonian democracy

Rare card · No. 51359

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 certain forms of concentrated economic power (such as national banks), and a strong executive willing to act on behalf of the people. 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...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl, Public domain