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)
9:00-11:00 EuParl.net Board meeting at History of Parliament, Old Street (for board members only)
12:00 Registration at QMUL Central Campus
12:30-13:20 Welcome and introduction by Christina von Hodenberg, Pasi Ihalainen & Robert Saunders
- Pasi Ihalainen (University of Jyväskylä): Political representation: Tensions between parliament and the people from the Age of Revolutions to the 21st Century (on a Reseach Council of Finland Project)
- 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
13:30 Session 1: Early modern concepts of representation, parliaments and democracy.
- Chair: Pasi Ihalainen
- Paul Seaward (History of Parliament): Parliaments and the management of disagreement: factions, parties, and the breakdown of consensus cultures in early modern Europe
- Markku Peltonen (Helsinki): Political science and democracy in early modern Germany
14:30 Coffee/tea break
15:00 Session 2: Changing theories and practices of representation in the Age of Revolutions.
- Chair: Paul Seaward
- Joanna Innes (Oxford): Corporate vs individual representation
- Will Selinger (Oklahoma): William Blackstone and the turn to parliamentary sovereignty
- Zachris Haaparinne (Jyväskylä): Hark, the people speak! John Wilkes, People’s Petitions, and the rise of scale-based argumentation, 1770-1795
- Lauren Lauret: (Leiden) Colonies as catalysts for change or continuity? Political representation in the Dutch Age of Revolutions
16:30 Break
16:45 Session 3: Experiences of lacking representation in the age of restoration, 1800-1860
- Chair: Willibald Steinmetz
- Morten Nordhagen Ottosen, The case for limiting representation: The liberal political culture of capacity and limited suffrage
- Alvin Jackson
- Anne Engelst Nørgaard
- Jussi Kurunmäki & Jani Marjanen, In absence of representation: Foreign models, conceptual innovation, and the emerging public sphere in Finland, 1809-1863
18:15 Check-in for on-campus accommodation
19:00 Public event with MPs, parliamentary reporters and interns: Working in Parliament
20:30 Buffet sponsored by University of Jyväskylä
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 (Open University): 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
- 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 parliamentary democracies: Prewar Belgian and Dutch debates and French-Algerian interactions
- Robert Saunders (QMUL): ‘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
- Luke Blaxill (Oxford): Text mining and the history of representative democracies: challenges and opportunities in the age of big data
- Marie Puren (LRE)
- Hugo Bonin, Pasi Ihalainen, Jani Marjanen & Risto Turunen (Jyväskylä & Helsinki): Quantitative conceptual long-term analyses of parliamentary discourse on democracy
- Jure Gašparič (Institute of Contemporary History, Ljubljana) & Adéla Gjuričová (Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences), The Europeanisation of post-socialist parliaments in the light of corpus analysis: The Czech and Slovene cases
15:30 Coffee/tea break
16:00 Session 6: Postwar Western democracies: parliamentary perspectives.
- Chair: Jani Marjanen
- Martin Conway (Oxford): The divorce of democracy and parliaments? The changing role of parliaments in post-1945 European democracy
- Pasi Ihalainen & Risto Turunen (Jyväskylä): Cold War ideological divisions over parliamentary democracy in Western Europe: Quantitative and qualitative approaches
- Henk te Velde (Leiden) & Ruben Ros (Utrecht)
- Pepijn Corduwener (Utrecht): The public financing of parties and the evolution of parliamentary democracy: a historical perspective” (remotely)
17:30 Transit to the venue of the keynote lecture
18:15 Peter Hennessy Lecture, chair Robert Saunders, QMUL campus, TBC
19:45 Wine reception hosted by QMUL
20:30 Dinner buffet hosted by JYU (conference participants and keynote speaker only)
Draft programme for Friday 26 June (GHIL, Bloomsbury Square)
9:30 Session 7: The interwar crisis of parliamentarism and democracy.
- Chair: Marnix Beyen
- Jörn Leonhard
- Marcus Llanque: Political movements and parliamentarian parties: Tensions between democracy and parliamentarianism in the interwar years
- Pasi Ihalainen, Jussi Kurunmäki, Jani Marjanen, Risto Turunen & Milla Virolainen: Crisis of democracy as a contagious concept: Europe from the interwar era to the present
11:00 Coffee/tea break
11:30 Round table 2: How and why has representative democracy changed since 1968?
- Chair: Benedikt Wintgens
- Christina von Hodenberg (GHIL)
- David Runciman (Cambridge)
- Ronald Kroeze (Radboud Nijmegen), (the increasing attention paid to control, integrity and
transparency in representative democracy since the 1970s) - Adéla Gjuričová (Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences
13:00 Sandwich lunch
14:00 Session 8: Challenges to/of political representation and populism: Theoretical and historical insights.
- Chair: Jussi Kurunmäki
- Hugo Bonin: From stable to liberal democracy: A Franco-British story
- Alan Finlayson: Parliamentarians’ representative claim in the age of the online influencer
- Samuel Hayat: Antipolitical representation: mobilizing citizens against parliamentary politics
15:30 Coffee/tea break
16:00-17:30 Round table 3: Ways ahead for representative democracy.
- Chair: Robert Saunders
- Duncan Kelly
- Yves Sintomer
- Rieke Trimçev
17:30 Closing of the conference
