Book Review

When did the elite-based politics of the early national period develop into a full-blown two-party system? What determined voter choice in the age of mass political parties? Donald J. Ratcliffe returns to these long-standing questions and offers a new periodization scheme for American political history. Ratcliffe holds that a mass-based two-party system was in place long before the organizational innovations of the Democratic and Whig parties. The depression of 1819–1821, the Missouri crisis, Henry Clay's "American system," and a plethora of state-level controversies, to name but the most important issues that Ratcliffe identifies, established the contours of national two-party competition, mass organization, high voter turnout, and stable voter loyalty that most historians date to the latter 1830s. In Ohio the "second party system" merely elaborated upon elements that crystallized in the pivotal presidential contest of 1828. This reformulation enables Ratcliffe to offer a political explanation for voting behavior in the Jacksonian years. Ohio's complex ethnoreligious, economic, and regional divisions all played crucial parts in establishing the issue orientations that separated National Republicans from Jacksonians by 1828. Yet the usual ethnoreligious or economic explanations of Whig and Democratic voting behavior fail to account for the foundation of beliefs, experiences, and practices laid down between 1818 and 1828. That foundation established the political habits of Ohio's diverse communities and constituencies and thus shaped most voters' (Ratcliffe is careful not to say all voters') response to subsequent political controversies.

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