new sources and new interpretations
As we have noted in chapter 1, students of contemporary political behavior--political scientists, sociologists, and psychologists--have elaborated several ways of analyzing popular voting systematically. They have polled individual voters, collected detailed election returns, and correlated both kinds of data with other information, particularly demographic statistics describing the electorate. From this they have proceeded to explain the outcome of any single election and to develop a number of propositions about the general nature of electoral behavior.
Historians of Jacksonian politics have adapted these interdisciplinary methods and findings to their own purposes. They have read widely in the literature of contemporary electoral analysis for insight into the range of factors potentially affecting political choice. They have developed from this a number of propositions about voting behavior that they can test against their own evidence from the Jacksonian period. Most of all, however, they have focused on improving their data. They have carefully collected the election returns necessary to spell out exactly where each party received its popular support. They have constructed systematic time series of election results and pinpointed where and when changes took place in the level of support for one or the other party. Most important of all, they have related voting patterns to the characteristics of the population in order to determine the social bases of electoral choice and political belief. In all of this their emphasis has been on moving away from their traditional reliance upon literary data and substitut