This closing conference of the Academy of Finland Professor Project Political Representation: Tensions between Parliament and the People from the Age of Revolutions to the 21st Century explores the contested nature of concepts that have been and are used to construct democracy.
This is done on one hand by analyzing how parliamentarians’ understandings of representation and democracy have changed over time in interaction with society at large, including the media and academia, and on the other on how the parliamentary form of representative democracy has been debated in extra-parliamentary theorizing and discussions.
Parliaments and Representative Democracy: Perspectives from the Past and the Present
Date: 24-26 June 2026
Venues: Queen Mary University of London (Mile End - Queen Mary University of London, including on campus accommodation) and the German Historical Institute in London (17 Bloomsbury Square, German Historical Institute London – Google Maps)
Attendance by invitation only
Draft programme for Wednesday 24 June (QMUL Mile End)
9:00-10:00 Registration (for EuParl.net Board)
10:00-11:30 EuParl.net Board meeting at History of Parliament, Old Street (for board members only)
12:00 Registration at QMUL Central Campus, Bancroft Building
12:30-13:20 Welcome and introduction by Pasi Ihalainen, Jennifer Davey and Christina von Hodenberg (Bancroft Building, David Sizer Lecture Theatre)
- Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä): From Representation to Participation – and Back Again : How Parliamentarians Redefined Democracy in Northwest Europe since the Nineteenth Century.
- Jennifer Davey (History of Parliament): Research on the history of democracy and parliament at the History of Parliament.
- Christina von Hodenberg (German Historical Institute in London): The German Historical Institute in London as a facilitator of research in comparative European and global history.
13:20-13:30 Break
13:30 Session 1: Early modern concepts of representation, parliaments and democracy. (Bancroft Building, David Sizer Lecture Theatre)
- Chair: Pasi Ihalainen (Jyväskylä)
- Paul Seaward (History of Parliament): Parliaments and the management of disagreement: faction, party and the structure of political argument in early modern Europe
- Markku Peltonen (Helsinki): Political science and democracy in early modern Germany
14:30 Coffee/tea break (Bancroft Building, Bancroft Foyer)
15:00 Session 2: Changing theories and practices of representation in the Age of Revolutions. (Bancroft Building, David Sizer Lecture Theatre)
- Chair: Paul Seaward (History of Parliament)
- William Selinger (Oklahoma): William Blackstone and the turn to parliamentary sovereignty.
- Zachris Haaparinne (Jyväskylä): Hark, the People Speak! Wilkes, people’s petitions, and the rise of scale-based reasoning, 1770—1795.
- Lauren Lauret (Leiden): Colonies as catalysts for change or continuity? Political representation in the Dutch Age of Revolutions.
- Joanna Innes (Oxford): Corporate vs individual representation.
16:30 Break
16:45 Session 3: Experiences of lacking representation in the age of restoration, 1800-1860. (Bancroft Building, David Sizer Lecture Theatre)
- Chair: Willibald Steinmetz (Bielefeld)
- Morten Nordhagen Ottosen (Oslo): The case for limiting representation: The liberal political culture of capacity and limited suffrage.
- Alvin Jackson (Edinburgh): Parliamentary union, representation and militancy: Ireland, 1800-1880.
- Anne Engelst Nørgaard (Trondheim): Petitioning as a means of gaining representation. Denmark and Norway c. 1820-1850.
- Jussi Kurunmäki (Helsinki) & Jani Marjanen (Helsinki), In absence of representation: Foreign models, conceptual innovation, and the emerging public sphere in Finland.
18:15 Check-in for on-campus accommodation
19:00 Public event: History of Parliament's Oral History Project
- Chair: Jennifer Davey (History of Parliament)
- Panellists: Emma Peplow (HoP), Alfie Steer (HoP), Paul Seaward (HoP), Jennifer Davey (HoP)
20:30 Buffet sponsored by University of Jyväskylä (Bancroft Building, Bancroft 113)
Draft programme for Thursday 25 June (GHIL, Bloomsbury Square)
9:30 Round table 1: What do eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parliamentary history and history of political thought teach us about ‘democracy’?
- Round table discussion chaired by Paul Seaward (History of Parliament)
- Anna Plassart (London): The Enlightenment and the idea of democracy
- Richard Bourke (Cambridge)
- Willibald Steinmetz (Bielefeld)
11:00 Coffee/tea break
11:30 Session 4: Emerging parliamentary democracy from the reforms of the 1860s to the First World War.
- Chair: Henk te Velde (Leiden)
- Anne Heyer (Leiden): How to represent “the masses”? Discussions about mass politics in the German Reichstag and beyond, 1860-1914.
- Marnix Beyen (Antwerp): The compte rendu de mandat (mandate report) as a hub between citizens and députés in the French Third Republic.
- Karen Lauwers (Helsinki): Negotiating individual liberty in Western European parliamentary debates and petitions, turn of the 20th century.
- Robert Saunders (Queen Mary University of London): ‘A War for Democracy?’ Remaking British democracy in World War One.
13:00 Sandwich lunch
14:00 Session 5: Digital histories of representative democracy.
- Chair: Christina von Hodenberg (German Historical Institute)
- Luke Blaxill (Oxford): Text mining and the history of representative democracies: challenges and opportunities in the age of big data
- Hugo Bonin (Göttingen), Pasi Ihalainen (Jyväskylä), Jani Marjanen (Helsinki) & Risto Turunen (Jyväskylä): Quantitative conceptual history of parliamentary democracy
- Marie Puren (LRE EPITA Paris) & Florian Cafiero (LRE EPITA, Paris): From digitised archives to computational history: Reconstructing agenda-setting in the Third Republic. The DECIDON project.
- Jure Gašparič (Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana)& Adéla Gjuričová (Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague): The Europeanisation of post-socialist parliaments in the light of corpus analysis: Czech and Slovene cases.
15:30 Coffee/tea break
16:00-17:30 Session 6: Postwar Western democracies: parliamentary perspectives.
- Chair: Jani Marjanen (Helsinki)
- Martin Conway (Oxford): The divorce of democracy and parliaments?
- Pasi Ihalainen (Jyväskylä) & Risto Turunen (Jyväskylä): Defining the democratic West: Cold-War semantics of parliamentary and representative democracy.
- Henk te Velde (Leiden) & Ruben Ros (Utrecht): Knowledge, Expertise and Parliamentary Democracy in the Netherlands, 1848–2022.
18:30 Public lecture by Ian Dunt, author of 'How Westminster Works - and Why It Doesn't' (People's Palace, Skeel Lecture Theatre)
- Chair: Robert Saunders (Queen Mary University of London)
19:45 Wine reception hosted by QMUL (People's Palace Foyer)
20:30 Dinner buffet hosted by JYU (conference participants and keynote speaker only) Queens' Building/Colette Bowe Room
Draft programme for Friday 26 June (GHIL, Bloomsbury Square)
9:30 Session 7: The interwar crisis of parliamentarism and democracy.
- Chair: Marnix Beyen (Antwerp)
- Jörn Leonhard (Freiburg): Challenging democracy after the Great War: Crises of parliamentary cultures and representation in comparison
- Marcus Llanque (Augsburg): Political movements and parliamentarian parties: Tensions between democracy and parliamentarianism in the interwar years
- Pasi Ihalainen (Jyväskylä), Risto Turunen (Jyväskylä) & Milla Virolainen (Jyväskylä): Crisis of democracy as a transnational concept in interwar Europe: IPU, France and Finland.
11:00 Coffee/tea break
11:30 Round table 2: How and why has representative democracy changed since 1968?
- Chair: Benedikt Wintgens (KGParl, Berlin)
- Christina von Hodenberg (German Historical Institute)
- Adéla Gjuričová (Prague)
- Georgios Varouxakis (Queen Mary University of London)
13:00 Sandwich lunch
14:00 Session 8: Challenges to/of political representation and populism: Theoretical and historical insights.
- Chair: Jussi Kurunmäki (Helsinki)
- Samuel Hayat (CEVIPOF, Paris): Antipolitical representation: mobilizing citizens against parliamentary politics during the French Second Republic (1848-1852).
- Hugo Bonin (Göttingen): The contingent construction of ‘liberal democracy’: A conceptual history (1918–2001).
- Alan Finlayson (University of East Anglia, Norwich): Parliamentarians’ representative claim in the age of the online influencer
15:30 Coffee/tea break
16:00-17:30 Round table 3: Ways ahead for representative democracy.
- Chair: Robert Saunders (Queen Mary University of London)
- Joanna Innes (Oxford)
- Rieke Trimçev (Halle)
- Hugo Bonin (Göttingen)
17:30 Closing of the conference
