https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7564-9080
Parliamentary politics is the object of much criticism. Parliamentary debate is perceived as being too technocratic, party-driven and far removed from the concerns of ordinary citizens. One cannot help but wonder: is the parliamentary model in which rational arguments are exchanged at odds with mass democracy and the accessibility of democratic decision-making? Critics blame political institutions for slow and undue technical decision-making, and they see debating procedures as elitist and undemocratic. On the other hand, the role of emotions in public political debate seems to increase, as an expression of ‘the voice of the people’, a strategy employed not only by populist movements and politicians. Connecting procedural fairness to popular politics has proven – both in the past and present – to be a fundamental challenge for establishing citizens’ trust in politics.Footnote1
The tension between procedural fairness and accessibility is not a new one but goes back to the early days of modern democracy. In nineteenth-century parliaments, procedures and rules served to guarantee the exchange of arguments and opinions by allowing and regulating disagreement. Thus, political differences of opinion could be discussed in an orderly fashion and lead to binding decisions. From the 1870s onwards, the rules of parliamentary debate came under pressure in West European democracies. What was the use of reasonable debating and decision-making if a large part of the population remained excluded? Political assemblies and political debate were accordingly judged by a new standard of accessibility.
In this special issue, we explore how politicians and citizens in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries tried to resolve the tension between reasonableness and accessibility of political debate, both in and outside West European parliaments. Political practices are central to this analysis. What did political newcomers have to do in order to be listened to? What meaning did parliamentary rules have for ordinary citizens participating in public political discussions? And above all, how did they develop norms and practices for the conduct of democratic politics? To answer these questions, we use a political-cultural approach in which the rules of political debate are not self-evident, but rather the subject of an ongoing political struggle about the democratization of the political system.
Studies on ‘deliberative democracy’ of the previous decades have mainly focused on the normative aspect: how a discussion should proceed.Footnote2 But a reasonable exchange of arguments is not automatically a democratic norm; political discussion also consists of conflict, confrontation and plebiscitary aspects.Footnote3 We seek to uncover how the parliamentary tradition of a reasonable and gentlemanly exchange of arguments was partly followed, but also criticized and adapted within the parliamentary arena as well as in the world of debating clubs and in the public meeting hall.
In the changing political environment at the end of the nineteenth century, debating rules became increasingly important. Historians have shown that the ideal of rational debate existed first and foremost within the confines of the initially mostly aristocratic parliaments in Europe.Footnote4 Outsiders criticized the model of parliamentary debate as an instrument of a non-democratic elite.Footnote5 From the 1870s onwards, the expansion of suffrage gave new groups access to parliament, where, as new parties, they tried to break open the culture of debate. Although political newcomers initially rejected pure procedural fairness as the opposite of real and proper participation, they soon recognized that rules also offered protection to their new parties in parliament. They could build on traditions of working men's small gatherings and board meetings of unions which often followed strict rules.
With the expansion of suffrage and the opening up of the parliamentary arena, at the same time, citizens themselves became increasingly vocal. In public meetings outside parliament, inclusive though rowdy public discussion was rated above quiet reasonableness.Footnote6 Public meetings also seem to have offered a competing model of discussion: based on honour and perhaps manliness, they had their own ideas of fairness. The unrefined nature of these meetings also made politics more interesting and attractive, thus increasing the political commitment of the masses. In the public assembly, citizens and politicians confronted each other and thus reshaped the parliamentary ideal of agreement to disagree.
In this special issue, we distinguish three political arenas: (1) parliaments, (2) the assemblies, conferences and meetings of political parties and (3) the wider political arena of popular public meetings. Political actors moved between these arenas and, importantly, the written and unwritten rules of one arena became a topic of discussion in another. Our goal is to show how the history of one arena enriches our understanding of the other two. For this purpose, we brought together authors working on European political history in the nineteenth and even twentieth century. Their approaches are single-case studies as well as broader comparatives analyses. Together they show the continuous, productive and tension-ridden overlap and exchange between these arenas.
This interrelated multi-arena perspective enriches our understanding of parliament – perhaps the most studied arena in historiography. In the contributions by Henk te Velde and Theo Jung, parliamentary history is told from the perspectives of social practices and norms that shaped assemblies of parties and public meetings as well. Jung dedicates his contribution to the question of humour in the German Reichstag of all places. His article shows that parliamentary deliberation was never only about argument alone. Emotions were important tools of persuasion within the assembly as well. Henk te Velde shows that the ideal of honour provided unwritten rules to parliamentarians, who behaved according to their interpretations of this powerful social and exclusive code. He then proceeds to further analyse the competing model of honour in rowdy public meetings, as an alternative to in theory purely rational and formal parliamentary assemblies. These two articles collectively explore parliament as the place where rational deliberation was the norm but emotions played an equally important role in processes of inclusion and exclusion, and on the other hand, public meetings as the domain of honour but also deliberation.
Parliament might have been the most obvious place for a ruling assembly. Yet, it was not the only one and was also perhaps not the most relevant one for people's experience with politics. In the nineteenth century the public and later the party meeting became important places of discussion that fundamentally shaped political culture. Political newcomers, or ‘others’ as Josephine Hoegaerts calls them in her article, moved between public, party and parliamentary meeting in a way that seemed effortless, but actually required a thorough understanding of the conventions of each assembly. Hoegaerts analyses the hitherto understudied aspect of fluency whose mastering was a challenge that created many tensions.
The history of public meetings has been told as one of the heydays of democratic experimenting.Footnote7 After all, access to these assemblies was less regulated than to parliament where one had to gather the support of an exclusive group of elite voters. Martin Schoups demonstrates in his analysis of the meeting movement in Antwerp that the narrative of the democratic meeting needs to be treated with caution as meetings could be rowdy, intolerant and ultimately exclusive as well.
The interplay between public, party and parliamentary meeting shines through in all of the contributions. In a direct way, the interaction between the three comes to surface in the article of Anne Heyer and Anne Petterson. The comparison of the Netherlands and Germany shows that public meetings were not only the subject of parliamentary debate, parliament also tested its norms through the example of extra-parliamentary meetings. The response of parliamentarians was manifold, but the public meeting served as an antipole to test and confirm the legitimacy of parliamentary debate. Taking us to the twentieth century, Claudia Gatzka shows that the interaction between the three arenas continued. Parliament and the public directly encountered each other at electoral assemblies. In the 1960s, the rigid political structure of West Germany and elsewhere in Europe was broken up, allowing for a renewed connection, a two-way communication flow, between formal politics and everyday life.
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Notes on contributors
Anne Heyer
Anne Heyer is Assistant Professor in Political History at the History Institute at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Her work focuses on the ideas and practices of political participation from 1800 to the present day. She has mainly published on the history of political parties from an interdisciplinary perspective, including her monograph The Making of the Democratic Party (Cham, 2022). Her research interests also include digital history, populism, social movements and democracy in Europe (Germany, Netherlands, Britain and Spain).
Anne Petterson
Anne Petterson is Assistant Professor in Political History at the Radboud Institute for Culture and History (RICH) of Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Her research interests involve local, national and political identity formation in the daily lives of citizens in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recent publications are ‘Performing national identities in everyday life. Popular motivations and national indifference in 19th-century Amsterdam’ in Nations and Nationalism 29, (2023); the forum ‘What does it mean to be a politician?’ in Journal of Modern European History 18, (2020), (with Henk te Velde). Her PhD thesis (Leiden University, 2017), Eigenwijs vaderland. Populair nationalisme in negentiende-eeuws Amsterdam (2017) was awarded the prestigious Dirk Jacob Veegens Prijs of the Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen in 2018.
Henk te Velde
Henk te Velde is Professor of Dutch History at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is President of the Royal Netherlands Historical Society as well as of the (European) Association for Political History. In addition to the history of the Netherlands, his research interests include the comparative history of political culture, rhetoric and parliaments in Western Europe. His recent English language publications include Organizing Democracy. Reflections on the Rise of Political Organizations in the Nineteenth Century (Cham, 2017), edited with Maartje Janse; Democracy in Modern Europe. A Conceptual History (New York & Oxford, 2018), edited with Jussi Kurunmäki and Jeppe Nevers; The Ideal of Parliament in Europe since 1800 (Cham, 2019), edited with R. Aerts, C. van Baalen, M. van der Steen and M.L. Recker; Civic Continuities in an Age of Revolutionary Change, c.1750–1850. Europe and the Americas (Cham, 2023), edited with Judith Pollmann.
Notes
1 T. R. Tyler, ‘Procedural Justice, Legitimacy, and the Effective Rule of Law’, Crime and Justice: A Review of Research 30, (2003), pp. 283–358.
2 For an overview, see: A. Floridia, From Participation to Deliberation. A Critical Genealogy of Deliberative Democracy (Washington, 2017); A. Bächtiger, J.S. Dryzek, J. Manebridge and M.E. Warren (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Deliberative Democracy (Oxford, 2018); J. Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Berlin, 2001).
3 C. Mouffe, The Return of the Political (London, 1993). L.M. Sanders, ‘Against Deliberation’, Political Theory 25, (1997) pp. 347–76. S. Chambers, ‘Behind Closed Doors: Publicity, Secrecy, and the Quality of Deliberation’, The Journal of Political Philosophy 12, (2004), pp. 389–410.
4 P. Ihalainen, C. Ilie, and K. Palonen (eds), Parliaments and Parliamentarism. A Comparative History of a European Concept (New York, 2016); K. Palonen, Parliamentary Thinking. Procedure, Rhetoric And Time (Basingstoke, 2019); K. Palonen, The Politics of Parliamentary Procedure. The Formation of the Westminster Procedure as a Parliamentary Ideal Type (Leverkusen, 2014); H. te Velde, ‘Parliamentary Obstruction and the “Crisis” of Parliamentary Politics Around 1900’, Redescriptions. Yearbook of Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory 16, (2013), pp. 125–47; H. te Velde, Sprekende politiek. Redenaars en hun publiek in de parlementaire gouden eeuw (Amsterdam, 2015); R. Aerts a.o. (eds), The Ideal of Parliament in Europe since 1800; A. Heyer, The Making of the Democratic Party in Europe, 1860-1890 (Cham, 2022).
5 P. Cossart, From Deliberation to Demonstration. Political Rallies in France, 1868-1939 (Colchester, 2013); Heyer, The Making of the Democratic Party in Europe, 1860-1890; J. Vernon, Politics and the People. A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815-1867 (Cambridge, 1993).
6 J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England (Cambridge, 1998); J. van Rijn, De eeuw van het debat. De ontwikkeling van het publieke debat in Nederland en Engeland 1800-1920 (Amsterdam, 2010); W. Liebknecht, Über die politische Stellung der Sozialdemokratie (Berlin, 1869).
7 J. Lawrence, Electing our Masters. The Husting in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009); C. Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge, 2008).