From Greater Participation to Reinforced Representation: on UK, French and German Parliamentarians Debating ‘Democracy’, 2000–2019

Democracy remains both a consensual and contested term. While its changing character has often been discussed from a theoretical perspective, this article focuses more empirically on how parliamentary representatives themselves have perceived democracy as a political system, along with the needs to reform it, in the early 21st century. While politicians’ conceptions of democracy have been increasingly studied through interviews and questionnaires, we concentrate here on parliamentary plenary debates, a crucial source for retracing publicly enunciated positions. Employing a methodological blend of conceptual history and computer-assisted reading techniques, we analyse discussions in the United Kingdom, France and Germany comparatively. Quantitative examination of n-grams and relative term frequencies helps us to map debated themes and locate periods of intensive discussion, after which we proceed to a contextualising analysis and comparison of the uses of ‘representative’, ‘direct’ and ‘participative’ democracy. Our investigation demonstrates that, during the 2000s, members of parliament generally recognised a need to reform representative democracy and to respond to rising calls for increased citizen participation in political decision-making. While national variations appeared here and there (UK and German Members of Parliament focused on referendums, while French politicians embraced participation at the local level), their convergences are startling. However, this apparent consensus crumbled by the end of the 2010s. With the rise of far-right populism and their advocacy of referendums, as well as broader partisan reconfigurations, the question of direct democracy became increasingly polarised, while participation was increasingly embraced by some as a less-threatening alternative.