The purpose of this research is to show that the era of Jacksonian democracy, roughly the period 1825-1835, not only encompassed the values of its Whig predecessors but also reorganized and redefined those values in ways that directly shaped and prepared America, perhaps unwittingly, for the arrival of the present-day polyarchical pluralist system. But it was, in fact, no accident, as William Chambers explains:

The shapers of the American nation had provided lessons for a second generation of party leaders. They had shown what parties could be, and had marked the way toward a renewed American Party System which could sustain broad representation, mass participation and popular choice in a functioning political democracy.. …