Democracy, Participation and Contestation

Emmanuelle Avril, Johann N Neem, Emmanuelle Avril, Johann N Neem

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317750765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The establishment of democracy on both sides of the Atlantic has not been a smooth evolution towards an idealized presumed endpoint. Far from it, democratization has been marked by setbacks and victories, a process often referred to as 'contested democracy'. In view of recent mobilizations such as the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement, in which new technologies have played a key role, there is a need for a renewed analysis of the long-term evolution of US and UK political systems.

Using new areas of research, this book argues that the ideals and the practices of Anglo-American democracy can be best understood by studying diverse forms of participation, which go beyond classical expressions of contestation and dissent such as voting. The authors analyze political parties, social movements, communications and social media, governance, cultural diversity, identity politics, public-private actors and social cohesion to illustrate how the structure and context of popular participation play a significant role in whether, and when, citizens´ efforts have any meaningful impact on those who exercise political power. In doing so, the authors take crucial steps towards understanding how a vigorous public sphere and popular sovereignty can be made to work in today's global environment.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, British and US history, democracy, political participation, governance, social movements and politics.

Part I

Contested definitions of democracy

1 Rethinking 1828

The emergence of competing democracies in the United States

Reeve Huston

Nobody had ever seen anything like it. By ten in the morning on March 4, 1829, the streets were jammed with fancy carriages and farmers’ carts, “filled with women and children, some in finery and some in rags.” They had all come to see Andrew Jackson be sworn in as the new President of the United States. After the new president swore his oath and gave his speech, a long procession of “country men, farmers, gentlemen, […] boys, women and children, black and white” followed him to the White House and descended upon the presidential reception. The crowd smashed several thousand dollars’ worth of glass and china in the rush to get at the refreshments. Jackson was nearly crushed as the crowd pressed in on him to shake his hand. Men and boys in muddy boots entered through windows and climbed on the furniture to get a peek at the new president (Wilentz, 2010).

This scene has become what Sean Wilentz calls a “set piece of American political lore.” For all the disputes among historians about the character of Jacksonian-era politics, all agree that something new was happening. Some historians spy in the smashed china and muddied furniture evidence of an emerging golden age of American democracy, one that ushered in unprecedented popular participation in politics. Others exhibit varying levels of skepticism, from Ronald Formisano’s (1983) careful and ambivalent analysis of how democratic the so-called Second Party System was, to Edward Pessen’s (1978, 1984) dismissal of Jacksonian democracy as an elite sham. Whether sham or not, all agree that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 marked the beginning of a new era of partisan democracy (Leonard, 2002; Schlesinger, 1945; Sellers, 1994; Silbey, 1991; Watson, 1981, 1990; Wilentz, 2010).

I do not wish to dispute that something new was happening in March of 1829, but I do hope to offer a new interpretation of what, precisely, was happening. I will do so by examining the election of 1828 and its aftermath in two contexts: that of the partisan, democratic organizing of Republican and Federalist activists before 1815, and that of the widespread but sorely understudied democratic experimentation of the so called “Era of Good Feelings” (1815–1828). When we examine Jacksonian democracy in these contexts, two changes in perspective occur. First, Jacksonianism looks less like a new and unprecedented popular democracy than a far more systematic and centralized revival of Jeffersonian democratic practices. Second, it appears to be as much a containment and redirection of popular democratic aspirations as a fulfillment of them.

Formal politics and new political forms

Since the mid-1990s, political historians have been steadily uncovering evidence of widespread partisan activity and popular electoral mobilization in the 1790s, 1800s, and early 1810s. Andrew Robertson (2004), David Waldstreicher (1997), Simon Newman (1997), Jeffrey Pasley (1996, 2001, 2004), Donald Ratcliffe (1998), and others have shown that partisan practices and norms once thought to have originated in the 1820s and 1830s were quite widespread in the earlier era. Popular mobilization; partisan organization (in the form of newspapers, committees, and conventions); openly partisan appeals; official party tickets; a celebration of partisanship as necessary for a healthy political order; stable party loyalties in the electorate—all of these hallmarks of American two-party democracy flourished in states as far apart as Virginia, New York, Ohio, and New Hampshire, though they were not adopted everywhere. These institutions and practices were quite effective in drawing ordinary voters into electoral politics. Andrew Robertson (2004) has shown that, in most states, voter participation between 1808 and 1815 surpassed the turnout of 1828. The new literature on the era of Federalist-Republican competition makes it clear that the Jacksonian parties’ partisanship and popular mobilization were not new, but were a revival—with important changes—of older identities and practices.

The second point, and the primary focus of this essay, concerns the period between the end of Federalist-Republican competition (about 1815) and the election of 1828. This was in some ways an era much like our own: an era of economic crisis, political routines that discouraged responsiveness to popular pressures, and relentless democratic experimentation by people at the margins of politics. With the collapse of the Federalist Party after 1815, Republican leaders found themselves without serious opposition, and they abandoned the popular political mobilization that they had practiced since the mid-1790s. Instead, they placed a greater emphasis on a gentry-style insider politics that had coexisted with democratic mobilization. With virtually all political aspirants calling themselves Republicans, political alliances rested on what politicians called “friendship”: a patron-client relationship resting on the exchange of loyalty and favors (Huston, 2008). Electoral contests, according to Ratcliffe (1998: 209), became “one-sided personality contests.” Candidates’ friends promoted them on the basis of their character, talents, and devotion to principle (without specifying what principles they were devoted to), while circulating unflattering rumors about their rivals (Kentucky Reporter, 10 July, 1816; 12, 26 July, 2 August 1820; Albany Argus, 1 March 1816; 24 April 1818). Far more than during the first decade and a half of the century, legislators treasured their “independence”—their freedom from any influence, including constituent pressure. Instead of receiving instructions from his constituents, John Randolph of Virginia declared that “he should instruct them” (Annals of Congress, 14th Cong., 1st Sess., 1176, 1182).

While their leaders moved toward a more patrician style of politics, large numbers of outsider politicians and political newcomers embraced a diverse array of democratic ideals and practices, many of them more radical than political leaders had yet embraced. The Era of Good Feelings witnessed scores of popular protests and political insurgencies over Congressional salaries, banking, currency, debt relief, the suffrage, and local building codes. What most of them held in common was a belief that political leaders had become impervious to their constituents’ desires and were entrenching themselves as a special “privileged order.” These movements experimented widely in their political practices, seeking to provide ordinary citizens with a greater role in public affairs. Many sought to end property requirements for the suffrage. Others fought to redefine their relationship with their elected representatives. Reviving a practice that had lain dormant since the Revolutionary era, they issued binding instructions to their Congressmen, insisting that it was legislators’ duty to obey them. A Fourth of July toast in Washington, Pennsylvania voiced the new sensibility well: “Representation. What matters it whether a government be called a monarchy, or a republic, if the representative can with impunity disregard the wishes of his constituents? The will of the people is LAW, to the faithful lawmaker” (Western Moniter [Lexington, Kentucky], 5 July 1816).

Other movements sought to transform social, cultural, and economic life through citizen (and non-citizen) action alone, bypassing the state entirely. The Panic of 1819 inspired hundreds of citizen meetings advocating diverse solutions to hard times. Some sought government action: regulation or abolition of private banks, debt relief, economy in government. Others, however, sought to address macroeconomic woes through the collective action of ordinary citizens. An assembly in Cincinnati called on Ohioans to “resist” the banks of their city by refusing payment in “depreciated paper currency” (Kentucky Reporter, 16 August 1819). A meeting of farmers and planters in Huntsville, Alabama debated whether to join together in refusing to take the notes of Tennessee banks in payment for that year’s crop (Alabama Republican, reprinted in Nashville Gazette, 7 October 1820). A gathering of “Merchant’s Farmer’s Miller’s, & c” of Green County, Pennsylvania called on citizens of the county to “suspend payment of their debts for the present” in order to “prevent this section of the country from being drained of precious metals” (Washington Reporter, 18 January 1819). The proliferation of voluntary associations and reform movements after the War of 1812 had a more lasting impact. Whether they aimed at reforming morals, spreading the Gospel, promoting agriculture, or encouraging and educating mothers, these organizations sought to transform the moral, economic, and cultural landscape through the associated efforts of ordinary people (Boylan, 2001; Brooke, 2010; Koschnik, 2007; Neem, 2008; Walters, 1997).

Many of these new political efforts proved quite powerful. Nationwide protests against a Congressional pay raise forced scores of Congressmen to renounce their legislative “independence” and to promise to repeal the law that they had just enacted. Not that it did them much good: 81 percent of the Congressmen who had voted for the pay raise lost their bid for re-election that year (Skeen, 1986: 264–272). The sheer power of the movement to roll back Congressional pay was not lost on politicians who were out of power. In places as far apart as New York, Boston, and Kentucky, outsider activists latched onto popular movements or drummed up their own faux-popular political insurgencies and rode them into office. In doing so, they turned the demand that elected officials obey “the will of the people” into a staple of American political discourse (Kentucky Reporter, January–August 1817; Cole, 2004: 59–60; Robertson, 1855: 7–9).

The General and “the people”

Before his presidential bid in 1824, Andrew Jackson was not part of these popular and pseudo-popular movements. He was instead a more or less typical political type: a man born poor or of middling status who became rich as a lawyer and won renown, often through military leadership, and who adopted the consumption patterns and many of the manners of the gentry. Like other such men, Jackson was something of a code-switcher. A prominent member of the Blount-Overton faction in Tennessee, he excelled at insider, patron-client politics and at the old, genteel politics of honor and individual self-assertion. Like his fellow upwardly mobile politicians, he had a deft hand at popular appeal, as he had shown to great effect as an officer in the Tennessee militia and the regular army (Jackson, 1812; Remini, 1977; Wilentz, 2010: 168–175).

On issues of governance, Jackson was a strict constructionist of the US Constitution, which put him in the conservative camp against radical democrats. Unlike most conservatives, Jackson expressed deep faith in the virtue and judgment of ordinary citizens. But the only civic role he envisioned for them was voting (Remini, 1981: 30–36). He certainly did not envision them dictating policy to their elected officials. When Jackson came under fire for his Senate vote in favor of the tariff bill of 1824, he defended his legislative independence without reservation: “I cannot be intimidated from doing that which my judgment and conscience tells me is right by any earthly power” (Remini, 1981: 71). Nor did he have any sympathy for the radical democrats’ attacks on constitutional limits on popular power. In the early 1820s, radical democrats in Kentucky sought to replace a state supreme court that had invalidated a popular debt relief law. The New Court party insisted that the every branch of government ought to bow to “the will of the people”; failure to do so would inevitably result in oligarchy. Jackson denounced the movement, insisting that it “augurs […] the destruction of our republican government.” Their efforts to end judges’ independence from popular pressures would, he insisted, “place the Judiciary in the hands of these designing demagogues, and the Judiciary will become the mere tools of oppression of the people” (Remini, 1981: 27).

Jackson did, however, endorse demands for universal white male suffrage (Remini, 1981: 33). In this he was no different from the majority of western politicians (Keyssar, 2009: 23–35). Even more importantly, Old Hickory’s rhetoric overlapped significantly with that of the radicals. Like them, he expressed a deep trust in the virtue and judgment of ordinary citizens. And like them, he saw an urgent need for reform in the federal government. The General denounced the personal ambition and “intrigue” that had come to dominate national politics, arguing that it was making the federal government corrupt and unresponsive. He embraced a different solution than the democrats, however. Where they called for all branches of government to obey the expressed will of “the people” or for civic action independent of the government, Jackson called for a renewal of civic virtue in the political elite. It was elite commitment to public service and self-sacrifice, not obedience to constituents that would redeem the republic (Remini, 1981: 12–15, 26–31, 33, 36–37, 63–65).

The presidential election of 1824 brought the overlap between Andrew Jackson’s rhetoric and that of the radical democrats to the very center of American politics. In that year, the anointed heir to the presidency was Secretary of the Treasury William Crawford. A consummate insider, Crawford had spent his entire career assembling an extensive network of “friends,” and he used the resources at his disposal as Secretary of the Treasury to help those friend...