Petitions and Representative Government

This article investigates the relationship between petitioning and representative government through a reading of Bernard Manin’s The Principles of Representative Government (1997). It focuses on how the founders of the Danish representative government understood the relationship between petitioning and the liberal constitution they sought to create. I argue that the founders considered petitioning to be an obstacle to a representative political system. The rise of mass petitioning in Denmark in the 1830s threatened the legitimacy of the early Danish representative assemblies, as the petitions represented a larger part of the population than that which had elected the assemblies. Central to discussions about the place of petitions in the new representative political system were questions of whose voices belonged in parliament, and to whom the voice of the people belonged. Were the representatives even the true representatives of the people? Or should they give way to the voice of the people, as expressed in petitions? The article further argues that the right to petition parliament – one of the key democratic features of representative government – did not stem from the liberal founders of representative government but from the absolutist system that they were fighting.