Patterns
Historian Richard P. McCormick is most responsible for defining the term. He concluded:
- It was a distinct party system.
- It formed over a 15-year period that varied by state.
- It was produced by leaders trying to win the presidency, with contenders building their own national coalitions.
- Regional effects strongly affected developments, with the Adams forces strongest in New England, for example, and the Jacksonians in the Southwest.
- For the first time two-party politics was extended to the South and West (which had been one-party regions).
- In each region the two parties were about equal—the first and only party system showing this.
- Because of the regional balance it was vulnerable to region-specific issues (like slavery).
- The same two parties appeared in every state, and contested both the electoral vote and state offices.
- Most critical was the abrupt emergence of a two-party South in 1832-34 (mostly as a reaction against Van Buren).
- The Anti-Masonic party flourished in only those states with a weak second party.
- Methods varied somewhat but everywhere the political convention replaced the caucus.
- The parties had an interest of their own, in terms of the office-seeking goals of party activists.
- The System brought forth a new, popular campaign style.
- Close elections—not charismatic candidates or particular issues—brought out the voters.
- Party leaders formed the parties to some degree in their own image.
Read more about this topic: Second Party System
Famous quotes containing the word patterns:
“I’ve begun to appreciate the generational patterns that ripple out from our lives like stones dropped in water, pulsing outward even after we are gone. Although we have but one childhood, we relive it first through our children’s and then our grandchildren’s eyes.”
—Anne Cassidy (20th century)
“Teasing is universal. Anthropologists have found the same fundamental patterns of teasing among New Zealand aborigine children and inner-city kids on the playgrounds of Philadelphia.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)