14. Gerald Stourzh-Vorlesung zur Geschichte der Menschenrechte und der Demokratie
Pasi Ihalainen
Representative Democracy as a Contested Concept:
Parliaments after the French, Russian and Digital Revolutions
17. Mai 2023
© Petteri Kivimäki
Pasi Ihalainen ist Professor für vergleichende europäische Geschichte an der Universität von Jyväskylä, Finnland, und konzentriert sich auf die Geschichte des politischen Diskurses in langfristiger, vergleichender und transnationaler Perspektive. Derzeit untersucht er als Akademieprofessor die Geschichte der repräsentativen Demokratie und insbesondere die Spannungen zwischen Parlament und Volk zwischen dem 18. und 21. Jahrhundert, wobei er quantitative und qualitative Methoden kombiniert, um digitalisierte Parlamentsdebatten aus neun nordwesteuropäischen Ländern zu analysieren. Zu seinen bisherigen Forschungsthemen gehören politischer Pluralismus, Parlamentarismus, Nationalismus und Internationalismus. Professor Ihalainen ist Mitglied der Finnischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Ausgewählte Veröffentlichungen: 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 von 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.
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Grußworte und Einleitung:
Vizedekanin der Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät Juliane Schiel
Sprecherin des Forschungsschwerpunktes Demokratie und Menschenrechte Claudia Kraft
Sprecherin des Forschungsschwerpunktes Diktaturen – Gewalt – Genozide Kerstin Jobst
für das Organisationsteam der Gerald Stourzh-Vorlesungen: Margarete Grandner
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