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. The so-called first party era marks the transition from a “deferential” politics in which local elites exercised great influence over elections to a more recognizably democratic politics. But the extent of this transition has been largely opaque before these new data became available. Focusing on House of Representatives as the foundational institution in national republican government, Dow uses these election returns to provide a more fine-grained picture of US electoral development than ever seen before. In doing so, he reveals more party-centric, competitive, and developed elections than scholars have generally recognized.

The First Elections begins with the election to the Fifth Congress in 1796, the year that elections first became truly contested following the Federalist and Anti-Federalist period. It concludes with the elections to the Nineteenth Congress, which marked the start of the Jacksonian Second American Party System. Because American politics is territorial politics—in general, but especially in this era—Dow’s work is organized geographically, giving due attention to how electoral democracy developed unevenly across each region of the early United States. Since the states used different methods to elect their representatives, The First Elections pays special attention to the variety of electoral systems that characterized the political mosaic of early America.

The First Elections is a groundbreaking look at what elections were like in the dawn of the new American nation.

Jay K. Dow is professor of political science and constitutional democracy at the University of Missouri. He is the author of Electing the House: The Adoption and Performance of the U.S. Single-Member District Electoral System, also from Kansas.