The 1816 United States presidential election was the eighth quadrennial presidential election. It was held from November 1 to December 4, 1816. In the first election following the end of the War of 1812, Democratic-Republican candidate James Monroe defeated Federalist Rufus King. The election was the last in which the Federalist Party fielded a presidential candidate.

The Republican Party, retroactively called the Democratic-Republican Party, and also referred to as the Jeffersonian Republican Party among other names, was an American political party founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the early 1790s that championed liberalism, republicanism, individual liberty, equal rights, decentralization, free markets, free trade, agrarianism, and sympathy with the French Revolution. The party became increasingly dominant after the 1800 elections as the opposing Federalist Party collapsed.