14th Gerald Stourzh Lecture on the History of Human Rights and Democracy
Pasi Ihalainen
Representative Democracy as a Contested Concept:
Parliaments after the French, Russian and Digital Revolutions
17 May 2023
© Petteri Kivimäki
Pasi Ihalainen is Professor of Comparative European History at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, concentrating on the history of political discourse in the long term and from comparative and transnational perspectives. Currently, as an Academy of Finland Professor, he studies the history of representative democracy and especially tensions between parliament and the people between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, combining quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse digitised parliamentary debates from nine Northwest European countries. His previous research topics include political pluralism, parliamentarism, nationalism and internationalism. Professor Ihalainen is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.
Selected publications: Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685–1772 (2005); Agents of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800 (2010); Hg. mit Cornelia Ilie und Kari Palonen, Parliament and Parliamentarism: Comparative History of a European Concept (2016); The Springs of Democracy: National and Transnational Debates on Constitutional Reform in the British, German, Swedish and Finnish Parliaments, 1917–1919 (2017); Hg. mit Antero Holmila, Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined: A European History of Concepts Beyond the Nation State (2022).
Homepage of Pasi Iahalainen
Abstract
Democracy is a highly contested and historically elastic concept. The analysis of its changing meanings benefits from comparisons over time and beyond national histories, nowadays supported by digital history. In this lecture, I analyse conceptual struggles over representative democracy in parliamentary contexts after three revolutions: the French, the Russian, and the digital. From the 1790s, we can find not only persistence of the classical, pejorative, conception of democracy but also gradual re-evaluations towards representative democracy in both British and French parliaments. From the late 1910s, we can observe transnational links, common features and national peculiarities in redefinitions of representative democracy in Britain, Germany, Sweden and Finland. In our time, theorists suggest that democracy is changing, but how could we catch this change empirically? Taking parliaments as analytical nexuses, our research group has compared British, French and German debates. For most MPs in the 2000s, parliamentary or representative democracy had to be reformed to include more participation to reflect societal changes, new media structures and deepening European integration. Yet such consensus crumbled by the end of the 2010s, with a polarisation over direct democratic instruments and a stronger defence of the representative model.
Audio
Welcome and introduction:
Vice-dean of the Faculty for Historical and Cultural Studies Juliane Schiel
Speaker of the key research area Democracy and Human Rights Claudia Kraft
Speaker of the key research area Dictatorships – Violence – Genocides Kerstin Jobst
for the organising team of the Gerald Stourzh lectures: Margarete Grandner
Lecture by Pasi Ihalainen
Power Point-Presentation for the lecture