Republican Democracy Research Articles

The Historical Origins of Frail Party Politics in South Korea: The Abortive Experiment of Democratic Republican Party, 1963-1979

This article explores sources of party underdevelopment in South Korea by examining the historical origins of weak parties since the 1960s. To unravel the historical origins of weak political parties, this article focuses on the rise of and fall of Democratic Republican Party, the governing party during the authoritarian era in South Korea. It argues that the strong state and patron-client structure worked against DRP’s experiment for strong party. Lacking stable social roots and extensive party organizations across the country, DRP had to rely upon the traditional patron-client structure of society and state administration organizations for electoral mobilization. Yet the U. S. pressure, domestic demand and factional strife within the regime served to mitigate those constraints. The gradual decline of DRP and electoral politics from the mid-1960s resulted not solely from the influence of the environmental factors such as the weakening of U.S. influence and factional conflict which were powerful and intense until the mid-1960s, but also from Park’s own effort to build up authoritarian regime. The implication of the fall of the DRP has to do with its lasting legacy on party politics in Korea. Initially, the DRP represented a new experiment in Korean party politics that had long been plagued by the lack of programmatic coherence, organizational stability and linkage to the civil society. Eventually, DRP turned out to be not an exception to traditional Korean political parties. Highly centralized power structure around personal network, subsequent organizational frailty and incompetence on policy matters characterized the DRP.

The Historical Origins of Frail Party Politics in South Korea: The Abortive Experiment of Democratic Republican Party, 1963-1979

The Historical Origins of Frail Party Politics in South Korea: The Abortive Experiment of Democratic Republican Party, 1963-1979

Community Policing in the Traditional Igbo Society: A Model for Preventing Crime in the Contemporary Nigerian Society

Community policing is neither foreign nor novel to Africa. Long before the coming of Europeans, the traditional Igbo society of the now south-eastern Nigeria had devised means of policing its communities and curbing or preventing crime using primarily the age grade system and masquerade secret society. This approach was very effective in enabling the pre-colonial Igbo society in not just fighting crime but also in preventing crime. Given the current security challenges in the contemporary Nigerian society, there is a need to revisit this model of community policing for the purpose of preventing and curbing crimes such as terrorism, insurgency, armed robbery, commercial hostage taking (kidnapping), militancy, pipeline vandalisation, oil theft (illegal bunkering), etc. The paper also noted that taking into consideration the ‘acephalous’, decentralised, egalitarian, communalistic, ‘gerontocratic’, villagised, largely republican and directly democratic character of the traditional Igbo society is necessary for adapting its mechanism of community policing into the more complex, less decentralised, republican, federal, capitalist and indirect democracy of the modern Nigeria. The study is essentially descriptive, historical and qualitative.

Public Intellectuals and Politics in Cuba: A Case Study of Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza (1872–1956)

The dependent character of the Cuban bourgeoisie in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1895–98, the cycles of economic and political crisis with roots in the Island's sugar monoculture and economic dependency on the US and the pattern of US interventions in Cuban affairs under the Platt Amendment produced a profound crisis of legitimacy of the Cuban state during the Republic. Public intellectuals, in Antonio Gramsci's definition, played an important role in mediating the cyclical crisis with the purpose of maintaining public consent for Republican institutions, political parties and elites. Cosme de la Torriente y Peraza was a leading figure among public intellectuals who performed this role on behalf of Republican democracy beginning with the administration of President Estrada y Palma (1902–06) and culminating with the Fulgencio Batista regime (1952–58). His political career provides insights into the root causes of the crisis of confidence in Republican political institutions and leaders that paved the way for the Revolution of 1958.

Republican democracy and compulsory voting

In this article, I focus on Chapters 4 and 5 of On the People’s Terms, chapters that deal with democratic influence and control. I take an applied political science approach to how Pettit’s republic might be practically achieved by exploring the under-appreciated capacity of elections to mobilise the resistance-prone, contestatory public upon which his republicanism depends. Whereas Pettit tends to focus on public contestation between elections and only demands that the public has the opportunity to vote when elections are held, I argue that they should be given a more prominent role within his republic and further, that access to voting is not enough: rather, citizens should actually vote. In order to ensure that participation is socially inclusive and that the public’s attempts at influence are ‘individualised’, ‘unconditioned’ and ‘efficacious’ in the manner Pettit desires, I suggest that compulsory voting should be a major pillar of his republicanism.

The Origin of Democratic Republicanism - the First Political Korea Wave in the Early 20th Century -

이 글의 목적은 민주공화주의 이념의 기원과 그 정치철학적 의미를 밝히는데 있다. 1919년 4월 11일 대한민국임시정부 헌법(?임시헌정?) 제1조에 명시된 민주공화주의 이념은 서양 정치철학사에서 찾아보기 힘든 합성어이다. 서양 정치철학의 전통에서 민주주의와 공화주의 이념은 지배형식과 통치형식을 지칭하는 용어로 수준을 달리하며 또한 오히려 일상적인 의미에서는, 오늘날 미국의 양대 정당의 명칭이 시사하듯, 평등과 자유 사이에 일정한 긴장을 수반하기도 한다. 이런 이유로 1776년의 「미국독립선언문」이나 1779년의 「미국헌법」 어디에서도 이 단어는 나타나지 않는다. 또한 1789년 프랑스혁명의 「인권선언」이나 프랑스공화국 헌법 어디에도 이 개념은 찾아볼 수 없다. 서구 현대국가 일반과 현재의 대한민국 헌법에도 많은 영향을 미친 독일 바이마르 공화국 헌법은 「임시헌정」보다 몇 달 뒤인 1919년 8월에 제정되었지만, 여기서도 이 개념은 없다. 또한 동아시아에서 첫 번째 공화혁명이었던 신해혁명으로 만들어진 중화민국도 민주공화주의를 제창하지는 않았다. 민주공화주의는 우리 애국지사들이 당시 노골화하던 제국주의적 침탈의 세계사적 조류를 거슬러 일본의 국권 강탈과 국토 침략에 저항하기 위해 만들어낸 독창적인 정치철학적 이념이며, 국권회복을 위한 치열한 고뇌를 담아내는 자생적 개념이다. 또한 이 민주공화주의 이념은 「3 · 1운동」의 국제적 전파력과 함께 중국의 「5 · 4운동」등 아시아지역의 민족해방운동에 기폭제 역할을 수행함으로써, 대중문화를 주축으로 한 지금의 한류와 차원을 달리하는 20세기 초 아방가르드적 정치 한류의 원형을 형성한다.

Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850 by John R. Van Atta (review)

Reviewed by: Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850 by John R. Van Atta Kevin T. Barksdale (bio) Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850. By John R. Van Atta. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Pp. xi, 294. $54.95 cloth) In Securing the West: Politics, Public Lands, and the Fate of the Old Republic, 1785–1850, John Van Atta examines the evolution of federal western land policies. From the republican-infused ideals of the Revolution to the antebellum congressional debates over distribution, Van Atta traces the political, economic, and cultural implications of the ever-shifting western land policies and their consequences on the “character of American society” (p. 205). Van Atta begins his analysis of western land policies with the “original” blueprint for land distribution, which emerged out of the republican idealism of the Revolution. Rooted in the desire for an orderly and egalitarian settlement of the West that eschewed the aristocratic privilege of Britain’s speculator-friendly policies, America’s first land policies sought to populate the region with virtuous, republican farmers. Under Federalist leadership, this original land policy was replaced with a Hamiltonian vision for western land development, which emphasized a deceleration of settlement, ending squatting, and asserting federal control. Driven by fears of overexpansion, Indian warfare, lawlessness, and the alleged threat to eastern economic development, Hamilton and his Federalist allies crafted a “socially elitist” philosophy of western land development (p. 51). The Federalist policies sparked a backlash from westerners who criticized federal control of lands and the perception of anti-western sentiment in the East. After the Republican ascendency in 1800, Jeffersonian Republicans again altered western land policy (i.e., the Land Act of 1800) by accelerating land sales in an effort to pay off the national debt and fund western internal improvements. Following the Panic of 1819, land policies again underwent alteration as land reformers like Thomas Hart Benton and Jeremiah Morrow sought to avoid a western backlash caused by high levels of debt and to reverse the region’s moral decay. Morrow’s Land Act of 1820 and [End Page 737] Benton’s 1824 graduation legislation ended credit sales and auctions in order to curtail rampant speculation and to ensure regional settlement by morally upstanding individuals. Land reformers introduced the controversial concepts of graduation, the lowering of land prices the longer they remained unsold, and preemption, upholding the claims of original settlers, to the debates over western lands. Once again, westerners and their political allies (e.g., Virgil Maxey) opposed federal control of western lands and revenue. The debate over western lands intensified during the John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson administrations as Henry Clay’s western vision clashed with the agrarian-centered reforms promoted by Benton. Van Atta argues that historians have overlooked the critical role western land played in Clay’s American System. Clay’s western policies were rooted in protectionism (i.e., tariffs), the establishment of home markets, balancing manufacturing and agriculture, and using land sales to fund national internal improvements. As Adams’s treasury secretary Richard Rush implemented Clay’s vision, western political leaders (e.g., Ninian Edwards) flirted with nullification as a strategy to challenge federal control of western lands. The sectional nature of the debate deepened during Jackson’s presidency after Connecticut congressman Samuel A. Foot introduced legislation that would temporarily halt western land sales in an effort to maintain the eastern labor pool and protect New England manufacturing. Despite Van Atta’s assertion that there was no real New England anti-western bias, both western and southern political leaders condemned the Foot proposal and accused the Connecticut congressman of harboring hostility toward the West. Benton and his supporters alleged that the Foot proposal would harm western agriculture, slow migration, and disrupt the natural settlement process. The specter of nullification emerged once again during the “Great Debate” between Daniel Webster and states’ rights proponent Robert Hayne, as Hayne protested federal control of western lands and Webster sought to keep the West from developing in the image of the slave South. In the final two chapters, Van Atta examines the continuing efforts...

Non-domination and Political Institutions: The Contested Concept of Republican Democracy

Following the republican revival of the last few decades, the ideal of freedom as non-domination has become an important point of convergence among republican theorists, especially among those associated with neo-Roman republicanism. Furthermore, all neo-Roman theorists argue that a legitimate republican polity in contemporary societies must take a democratic form to overcome the aristocratic and elitist features pervasive in classical and modern republicanism. This study argues that the emerging concept of republican democracy remains essentially contested despite the increasing agreement on the ideal of liberty being constitutive of the republican tradition. It posits that the meaning of the concept of republican democracy becomes unstable in the transition from the normative ideal to the institutional level of neo-republican reasoning, which is evidenced by the fact that neo-Roman theorists embrace the ideal of non-domination but disagree on the characteristics of the institutional design capable of realizing that ideal. To substantiate this argument, the study compares three recent models of democracy that are somehow associated with neo-Roman republicanism—the electoral-contestatory model, the political constitutionalism model, and the Machiavellian democracy model, championed by Philip Pettit, Richard Bellamy, and John McCormick, respectively.

Rawlsian Property-Owning Democracy: An American Historical Interpretation

This article analyzes Rawlsian property-owning democracy in the American historical context. The purpose of the article is to reveal an “overlapping consensus” between Rawlsian property-owning democracy and the American political tradition that in turn could be of great value to Rawlsians wishing to make a persuasive argument for liberal reforms. I examine three historical periods—Jeffersonian democracy, the age of Populism and Progressivism, and the New Deal—showing how New Dealers, with their Keynesian fiscal approach, diverged from the American political tradition advocated by previous reformers and how Rawlsian property-owning democracy, as a substitute for the capitalist welfare state, could reconnect with that important tradition.

Control discourses and power relations of yellow fever: Philadelphia in 1793

1793 Yellow fever in Philadelphia was the most severe epidemics in the late 18th century in the United States. More than 10% of the population in the city died and many people fled to other cities. The cause of yellow fever in the United States had close relationship with slaves and sugar in Philadelphia. Sugarcane plantation had needed many labors to produce sugar and lots of Africans had to move to America as slaves. In this process, Aëdes aegypti, the vector of yellow fever had migrated to America and the circumstances of ships or cities provided appropriate conditions for its breeding. In this period, the cause of yellow fever could not be established exactly, so suggestions of doctors became entangled in political and intellectual discourses in American society. There was a critical conflict between Jeffersonian Republicanism and Federalism about the origin and treatment of yellow fever. Benjamin Rush, a Jeffersonian Republican, suggested urban sanitation reform and bloodletting. He believed the infectious disease happened because of unsanitary city condition, so he thought the United States could be a healthy nation by improvement of the public health and sanitation. He would like to cope with national crisis and develop American society on the basis of republicanism. While Rush suggested the improvement of public health and sanitation, the city government of Philadelphia suggested isolation of yellow fever patients and quarantine. City government isolated the patients from healthy people and it reconstructed space of hospital. Also, it built orphanages to take care of children who lost their parents during the epidemic and implemented power to control people put in the state of exception. Of course, city government tried to protect the city and nation by quarantine of every ship to Philadelphia. Control policies of yellow fever in 1793 showed different conflicts and interactions. Through the yellow fever, Jeffersonian Republicanism and Federalism had conflicted in politically, but they had interactions for control of the infectious disease. And with these kinds of infectious diseases policies, we can see interactions in local, national and global level.

From Agrarian Dreams to Democratic Realities

Wendell Berry’s claim that local food economies are the only viable alternative to an agro-food system that cares more about profit than either environmental health or human well-being has generated considerable controversy. The strengths and limitations of Berry’s vision, I argue, stem from its indebtedness to Jeffersonian republicanism. Furthermore, I demonstrate that John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems offers an alternative to Jeffersonian republicanism that embraces the third president’s faith in popular rule but lacks his preoccupation with economic self-sufficiency. Dewey gives contemporary citizens a framework for resisting the industrial food system that is more open to diverse perspectives and experiences, and more attentive to human interdependency. He also provides criteria that can be used to differentiate romantic and potentially reactionary forms of localism from efforts to build communities capable of challenging undemocratic concentrations of power.

Reading Newspapers: Press and Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America by Uriel Heyd (review)

Reading Newspapers: Press and Public in Eighteenth-Century Britain and America. By Uriel Heyd. (Oxford, UK: Voltaire Foundation, 2012. Pp. xii + 302, 11 illustrations, £65.)Reviewed by Jeffrey L. PasleyNewspapers are notoriously difficult for scholars to get a handle on, compared with other types of printed literature. Books and pamphlets are discrete entities with beginnings and endings that can be read in their entirety, listed in bibliographies, and stored on shelves, and usually cover only one subject or author. The more variegated content of early American magazines can be consumed in entire runs of issues spanning decades, because they were published only monthly or less. Newspapers are another matter. Full of miscellaneous content (advertising, price lists, government documents, speeches, essays, and poems, along with the news items), they would appear never-ending. Published far more frequently-at least weekly-and in greater numbers of distinct issues than other print publications, newspapers poured from the presses.Most scholars shy away. When Charles Evans set out to catalog every item ever published in his American Bibliography, he left out the newspapers, and Clarence Brigham had to compile two additional thick, oversized volumes to catalog all the newspapers he identified. Brigham's publishing dates had to be stated in ranges and his titles given in long lists of variants that might change year to year. Those few scholars without the sense to avoid such a morass have tended to produce massive tomes, teeming with titles and quotations even when covering only a decade or two.1Israel-based scholar Uriel Heyd, either emboldened by distance or hampered by limited access to sources, takes a much more telescoped approach. In a slim but handsome volume laced with charts and illustrations, Heyd attempts to analyze the newspaper as a whole, in both Britain and America, across the entire eighteenth century. The results are as hazy and scattered as that description suggests. Heyd tries to take in not just the supply side of Anglo-American history, the newspapers themselves, but the demand side as well, the lived experience of newspaper reading. Such comprehensiveness is a laudable goal, but meeting it in a small space requires taking some problematic shortcuts.To map out the of the press in his long initial chapter, Heyd relies entirely on sampling the opening manifestoes of newspapers, a kind of mission statement and self-advertisement that eighteenth-century newspapers commonly published in their early issues. These are interesting documents, but highly ritualistic in the way editors almost always pledged to be fair and impartial, avoid personal attacks, and provide useful information and entertainment for a broad audience. These generic promises varied relatively little from paper to paper, but did not necessarily predict the editors' actual behavior once the publication got going. Heyd does not address this problem effectively, given his chosen source material. Instead he treats the editors' announced intentions as reality, leading to serious omissions. Noting that American newspapers claimed a more ambitious role in the advancement of society (77) toward the end of the century, Heyd highlights the Enlightenmentderived language of several of the more strident partisan newspapers, including Benjamin Franklin Bache's General Advertiser (later the Aurora) and Phinheas Allen's Pittsfield Sun. Yet he never mentions their most important civic role as pillars of the Democratic Republican party, despite announcing that community formation a la Benedict Anderson was one of the press's most important roles. …

A republican account of the value of privacy

This article provides an account of the value of privacy in securing the republican aims of self-government and conditions of non-domination. It describes how loss of privacy might lead to subjugation to dominating power. The republican concept of domination provides the foundation of a broad and coherent account of the value of privacy. One that encompasses circumstances in which the subject (i) suffers interference as a result of the loss, (ii) is aware that he has suffered a loss of privacy, but suffers no subsequent interference and (iii) is unaware that he has suffered any loss of privacy, and suffers no subsequent interference. Liberal accounts explain the value of privacy in the first two circumstances by pointing to the possible effect of the loss on the autonomy of the subject, but because they focus on autonomy are unable to explain why privacy is valuable where an agent is unaware of the loss. The republican account provided here explains why loss is harmful in all three circumstances. The final part of the article argues that because privacy is a pre-requisite for effective participation in political life, and republicans consider such participation to be the essence of self-government and the means through which a polity can secure conditions of freedom, in a republican democracy individual privacy will be seen as a collective good.

The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Emily Clark (review)

Reviewed by: The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World by Emily Clark Catherine Kerrison (bio) The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World. By Emily Clark. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Pp. 279. Cloth, $35.00.) When NBC anchor Brian Williams first visited New Orleans, the cockpit announcement on landing “welcomed . . . passengers to New Orleans by noting that they’d just left the United States” (193). Many attribute New Orleans’s sultry and decidedly exotic ambience to its French and Spanish colonial origins. What Emily Clark shows in her important new book, however, is that excluding the story of New Orleans from that of mainstream America has been a deliberate process, facilitated by the creation, manipulation, and commercialization of a fascinating figure: the mixed-race quadroon woman, whose seductive and wanton character has become synonymous with the city itself. By sequestering New Orleans as the place where the “linked sins of slavery and interracial sex” were committed, the rest of the country conveniently elides its own problematic racial history (194). Quadroons were not always exclusively New Orleanian. In what Clark dubs the “quadroon press war,” which broke out in Philadelphia in the fall of 1807, the squabbling factions of the Democratic Republican Party used the word “quadroon” to smear their opposition, explicitly challenging the legitimacy—indeed, the very humanity—of the other. Philadelphia had a history of contact with the Haitian term, which emerged when Haitian refugees, white and black, poured into the city in the 1790s. But whatever early sympathy Philadelphians may have had for the republicanism of the black Haitian rebels had well and truly vanished by 1807, as the hurling of racial epithets made clear. It was the second wave of Haitian refugees, all of whom headed to New Orleans in 1809, from which the stereotype of the quadroon emerged. Nine thousand strong, the refugees did not disperse over the eastern seaboard as had those of the earlier migration; rather, they overwhelmed the tiny city of ten thousand. At least a third of the migrants were free people of color, doubling the existing population of three thousand already there. Marriage was their preferred family pattern, but for the refugees, that option was defeated by demographics and a lack of wealth. By 1829, Clark calculates, there were 2.2 free women of color to every free man of color. Unable to compete with Creole women better endowed with dowries, refugee women adopted the Dominguan role of ménagère, in which a free woman of color managed a white man’s household and frequently became his life partner. This too was a common family pattern in Saint-Domingue, but refugee women were unable to reproduce this system exactly in America. Instead, [End Page 304] Clark explains, “exigency nudged many of them toward survival strategies that recapitulated the stereotype’s features [of seductive mûlatresse], reinforced its mythology, and transferred [its] primary site” from Saint-Domingue to New Orleans (63). In the process, the stable, contractual role of the ménagère of Saint-Domingue devolved to New Orleans plaçage, a liaison between a white man and a free woman of color that was a lifeline of support for the woman but lasted only until the man found a suitable wife. This practice was, Clark stresses, an “improvisational response of the refugee generation” (100). The problem was that visitors to New Orleans in the 1820s and 1830s, such as Karl Bernhard, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and Harriet Martineau, thought they were observing a long-standing tradition. They knew nothing of the colonial demographics of the city in which it had been a statistical impossibility for everyone to marry within their racial category. They missed the strategies white fathers had pursued to claim paternity of their mixed-race children in sacramental registers, to ensure the proper disposition of inheritances. They missed the 1808 code, forbidding interracial marriages, that the paternal strategies were designed to circumvent. They missed the fact that the norm in the colonial period for free women of color was a long-term relationship with a...

The Constitutional Monarchy and Modernization: Kang Youwei's Perspectives on "Keeping the Emperor and the Royal System in China"

At the end of the 19th century, China opened up its age of democratic revolution. Kang Youwei, a senior intellectual, advised Emperor Guangxu to establish the Constitutional Monarchy system in China as England and Japan did. However, his thoughts were condemned as “conservative”, “anti-revolutionary” by those radicals in his time. In this article, the author makes a deep exploration of the Constitutional Monarchy system in different countries in today’s world, the social roles of kings and monarchs, and the economic positions of today’s Constitutional Monarchy countries in the world. It is found that nearly all these countries are developed countries which gained political stability and economic prosperity by establishing the constitutional monarchy system and account for a large percentage in the world’s most developed countries. Compared to those democratic republican countries of the same period, they developed in a more stable and rapid way. The kings and queens play important roles in keeping the country stable and prosperous. Thus, history has proven that the Constitutional Monarchy is a great democratic system and Kang Youwei’s proposal of “keeping the emperor and the royal system” and establishing the Constitutional Monarchy system was the most suitable choice in terms of the situation of China at his time.

Imagining the Trans-Mediterranean Republic: Algeria, Republicanism, and the Ideological Origins of the French Imperial Nation-State, 1848-1870

This article looks at the dialogue between metropolitan political elites and Algerian activists that grew up during the Second Empire, revisiting an important moment in the making of France’s “modern” republican democracy. Through an examination of Algerian newspapers and publications, it assesses the role that colonial public opinion played in the “republican renaissance” of the 1860s, detailing how colon polemicists consciously tailored an ideology of moderate republicanism to fit colonial society and elaborate a brand of republican colonialism that would, in time, provide the ideological basis for the colonial republic. In placing nineteenth-century French political history in a trans-Mediterranean framework, this article challenges the customary history of hexagonal France, indicating the vital role colonial activists played in the making of republican colonialism, influencing considerations of the French nation and citizenship that would, in time, encourage the conception of a French imperial nation-state supported under the Third Republic. Le dialogue entre les élites politiques métropolitaines et les colons algériens jouait un rôle important dans la réalisation de la démocratie républicaine moderne française pendant le Second Empire. A travers sa lecture de divers journaux algériens, cet article met en lumière le rapport entre l’opinion publique coloniale et la « renaissance républicaine » des années 1860, ainsi que les moyens que les colons ont utilisés pour formuler une idéologie républicaine qui s’appliquait à la société coloniale. Cette idéologie allait jeter les bases de la république coloniale. En concevant l’histoire politique française dans une optique transméditerranéenne, l’article conteste l’histoire conventionnelle de la France hexagonale et révèle la contribution des activistes algériens français à l’édification du colonialisme républicain et aux conceptions de la nationalité et de la citoyenneté essentielles à la formation de la nation impériale française sous la Troisième République.

Enter the Alter-Left

Enter the Alter-Left

The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy by Jeffrey L. Pasley (review)

Reviewed by: The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy by Jeffrey L. Pasley Jeffrey L. Malanson (bio) The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy. By Jeffrey L. Pasley. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. Pp. 504. $37.50 cloth) In their efforts to define the elements of formal party systems, social scientists have concluded that the Federalist and Democratic-Republican parties were not true political parties. In The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy, Jeffrey L. Pasley argues that this focus on the institutionalized party has distracted historians from the very real partisan developments that took place in the 1790s. “The real importance of parties in the time of the Founders,” Pasley asserts, “is as rather loose but intense communities of political ideology, emotion, and action that took form among politicians, political writers, and their audiences” (p. 6). Throughout The First Presidential Contest, Pasley persuasively demonstrates the variety of ways that the 1790s was a time of real and sustained partisan development. Especially important in conceptualizing the partisanship of the 1796 campaign is Pasley’s call for the reader to “think of political campaigns…as stories: competing public narratives that seek to explain the world to voters in a way that compels a particular choice” (p. 225). From this vantage point it is clear that the partisanship of 1796 might not have been as fully developed as it would eventually become, but it was tangibly there in ways that recent generations of historians have been too quick to overlook. While generally working within the standard narrative of early party development, Pasley carefully presents the emergence of the Democratic-Republican Party as the expression of a liberal opposition mentality sharply contrasted with the more conservative beliefs of the Washington administration and its supporters. Questions of who should rule and what role the public should play in governing—the differences between aristocracy and democracy in the American context—were central in the developing political culture of the period. The great strength of The First Presidential Contest is that in exploring [End Page 287] these issues Pasley aims to offer a “practically minded ‘history from the middle out’ that means to show how politics actually works, how high and low (or ‘grass roots’) politics are connected” (p. 14). This means that, although Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison feature prominently in the book, it is not the founding fathers who drive Pasley’s narrative. In the political culture of the late eighteenth century, the candidates themselves largely refrained from playing an active role in their campaigns, leaving lesser officials and operatives to do much of the work enunciating party ideologies and advancing party candidates. Central actors in Pasley’s story include newspaper editors, pamphlet writers, lower-level party operatives, and individual presidential electors in states with popular voting for electors. The actions of all of these figures—especially Benjamin Franklin Bache, the editor of the Philadelphia General Advertiser/Aurora, and other members of the partisan press—contributed to a vibrant and contentious national politics that resonated in cities and towns across the country and had an impact on their elections. The First Presidential Contest presents a compelling and forward-moving narrative that reflects voluminous research in the print and political cultures of the 1790s. While generally outstanding, I would offer two small critiques. First, Pasley devotes roughly sixty pages to a very thorough consideration of anti-Jefferson essays written by William Loughton Smith in 1792 and 1796, and to Republican responses to A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America by John Adams. There is a lot of fascinating information contained in these pages, but at times it can pull the reader away from the bigger picture. I also quibble with Pasley’s overly partisan reading of what he calls “Washington’s Hamilton-written Farewell Address” (p. 265). On both the authorship of the address and the degree to which Washington intended it as a partisan document, Pasley overstates the case. These are relatively minor complaints about what is otherwise an excellent and extremely valuable study that should change the way historians understand partisan development in...

The Ambivalent Embrace of Kingly Power: Executive Clemency in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Politics and Constitutional Thought

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