If it were possible to pinpoint the date of the advent of modern politics in the West, the French Revolution would be the moment most scholars would choose. Since the 1980s, the Revolution has often been described as the ‘invention’, ‘discovery’ or ‘birth’ of modern politics. Even though the latter part of the nineteenth century has also been characterised in these terms, the Revolution is the earliest date most historians and others would mention. In 1789, the National Assembly or parliament was one of the most important signs that a new age had dawned for France. For the first time, representatives from all corners of the country came together for public deliberations on national political issues and in an assembly based on popular sovereignty. The National Assembly did not last long. Even if the subsequent revolutionary assemblies, such as the Convention, are included, it was over in a few years. However, a parliamentary system was re-introduced in the wake of the Bourbon Restoration, and it would never be completely abolished again.

Parliaments belong to the legacy of the Age of Revolutions. The British Parliament was much older, but as a general European (and American) system, parliaments started to emerge at the end of the eighteenth century, and even the British Parliament changed significantly, when it was opened to newspaper reporting in the 1770s.Footnote 1 Curiously, the attention for the ‘principles’ of this ‘representative system’ has always been rather one-sided.Footnote 2 Although in practice close ties existed between local electors and their national representatives, theorists of representative government almost invariably underlined the independence of parliamentarians. In fact, independent parliamentarians were often presented as morally superior to, as well as more politically sophisticated than MPs with (excessively) close local ties.

In this contribution, I will argue that local ties not only mattered in practice but that they are crucial to understanding the nature of representative government, and that the persistence of local ties belonged to the principles of nineteenth-century representative government. In fact, the development of the parliamentary system depended on the continuity of local ties, but because these ties seemed to threaten the precarious independence of representatives, they were not theorised. Mainstream formulations of the principles of representative government were rather lopsided, as if representation was one-way traffic directed by representatives. By discussing the continuing importance of local connections and interests, this contribution will argue that the new conceptions of parliamentary representation needed a practical substratum of ‘proximity’ to make them legitimate. The idea of proximity as a component of democratic legitimacy has only recently been theorised by Pierre RosanvallonFootnote 3 but it could be argued that it has always formed part and parcel of the practice and the idea of representative politics. I will discuss British, French and Dutch examples. Each national case has its own peculiarities, but together they show the virtual absence of local continuities in theory and their very real significance in practice. Starting with the classic formulations of member independence by Edmund Burke and then French parliamentarians, I will show that they were hiding mutual or reciprocal connections with the constituencies. I will then move on to the importance of local politics, mainly in Britain, and finally focus on the issue of ‘public’ versus ‘private’ in the juxtaposition of the national and the local, primarily in the case of the Netherlands. In doing so, I will try to explain why local politics often seemed to be obsolete and corrupt private matters.

Edmund Burke: (In)dependence of the MP

Edmund Burke’s views about the independence of representatives are almost too well-known to be recapitulated here, but in light of this contribution, they should be reconsidered. This has been done already, but mainly in the context of his biography; the implications for the history of representation have not really been assessed.Footnote 4 Burke’s ‘Speech to the Electors of Bristol’ (1774) provided, of course, the classic formulation of parliamentary representation:

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests; which interests each must maintain, as an agent and advocate, against other agents and advocates; but parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole; where, not local purposes, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole. You choose a member indeed; but when you have chosen him, he is not member of Bristol, but he is a member of parliament.Footnote 5

MPs should discuss and defend the general good, and not be guided by local prejudice. It is true that this statement is more famous now than it used to be in the late eighteenth century. Burke prided himself on being the first to use it as an argument during election time in a speech for his constituency. Nevertheless, even if some MPs defended the idea of ‘instructions’ by ‘constituents’, Burke’s conception was consistent with mainstream British views of representation at the time. That he felt the need to explain his position was not a sign of his self-evident independence, but part of a struggle to determine how he should behave now that he would be dependent on the voters (of Bristol) instead of the patron of a rotten borough. It is important to know, that his famous dictum was a reaction to an alternative delegate view of representation, put forward at the time, also by another Member of Bristol. At the next elections in 1780, Burke lost his seat because he disagreed with his Bristol constituency on crucial political issues, such as the consequences of the American struggle for independence. He felt that that was fair and he accepted the verdict of his constituency.Footnote 6

In the election campaign of 1774, Burke had also expressed his views about his responsibility to the constituency. He was proud to be chosen to represent the second city of the country. In his acceptance speech, in addition to stating his conviction that it was his duty as an MP to deliberate on the common good with his fellow-parliamentarians, he said:

it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinion, high respect; their business, unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his pleasures, his satisfactions, to theirs; and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own.

These were no empty words. It was his conviction that the power of Parliament was ‘directly dependent on its proximity to the people’, as the author of a classic article on Burke’s idea of representation states.Footnote 7 As an MP and a lobbyist, he also worked hard to promote the interests of his constituency. As he explained in his unsuccessful 1780 election campaign, in response to criticism of his absence from the constituency:

I could hardly serve you as I have done, and court you too [by visiting you]. My canvass of you was (…) in the House of Commons; it was at the custom-house; it was at the council; it was at the treasury; it was at the admiralty. I canvassed you through your affairs, and not your persons. I was not only your representative as a body; I was the agent, the solicitor of individuals; I ran about wherever your affairs could call me; and in acting for you, I often appeared rather as a ship-broker, than as a member of parliament. There was nothing too laborious or too low for me to undertake.Footnote 8

Burke did not shy away from lobbying and dirtying his hands in the direct service of his constituents. This was a way of demonstrating how seriously he took the community of constituents. Local attachments really mattered. As one historian of politics in the eighteenth century opined, the language of MPs about independence was partly a question of semantics. Constituents would send their representatives modest ‘entreaties’ and ‘requests’, but when the stakes were high, they might suddenly write ‘instructions’.Footnote 9 The fact that local ties were not part of Burke’s theory of representation shows how difficult it was to maintain independence in practice, even though opposition representatives sometimes asked for instructions from their constituents in order to put pressure on the government.Footnote 10 Burke and other parliamentarians implicitly distinguished between lobbying for their constituents, which was fine in practice, and ideological instructions, which were rejected, both in practice and in theory.

A couple of years later, Burke would nevertheless praise local ties, but in a completely different context, where he could more freely discuss British conceptions of representation. In a well-known section of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, he contrasts the artificial revolutionary French ‘départements’ with the ‘divisions of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by a sudden jerk of authority’. ‘We begin our public affections in our families’, then ‘we pass on to our neighbourhoods, and our habitual provincial connections’ and ‘the love to the whole is not extinguished by this subordinate partiality’ based on ‘unreasoned habits’.Footnote 11 This section has normally been read as an expression of his conservatism, but it could also be interpreted as an illustration of his ideas about representation. His ideas seem to be somewhat paradoxical. ‘It were better’, he wrote, ‘that no influence at all could affect the mind of a member of Parliament’.Footnote 12 Yet, he accepted patronage, as a concession to the practices of representation at the time. He also defended close practical ties with his constituents on principle, but he liked to decide for himself what to do with them, without being subject to ‘influence’. Yet again, he praised the embedded British form of representation as opposed to the abstract, revolutionary French representation. To understand what was at stake, it is useful to consider the notion of representation. For someone like Burke, representation meant representing people’s views or representing common or important interests, but he was also looking after the particular interests of his constituents in non-legislative contexts, which he perhaps would not call representation at all. So, let us see what the French had to say about their constituents during Burke’s time and later.

French Representatives: Austere Independence (In Theory) and Mutual Deference (In Practice)

The centralisation and destruction of local ties were part of the story that Burke and most French authors started to tell about the French Revolution. This story culminated with Tocqueville’s The Ancien Régime and the Revolution. Although Tocqueville concentrated on continuities, he mainly concentrated on the continuity of centralisation as a feature of French politics from the eighteenth century onwards. The national level dominated in most accounts of political developments, and this level was certainly central to mainstream French conceptions of representation from the Revolution onwards. During the Revolution, legitimations of the French parliament or National Assembly underlined the importance of the national level. Popular sovereignty was not taken to mean that local constituencies should determine national politics but demanded that parliamentarians decide what ‘the general will’ was. Among others, Siéyès, Talleyrand and Mirabeau defended the independence of the representative.

However, this ‘idealized position of deputy detachment from the opinions of their constituencies was seldom maintained in practice’, as historian of the National Assembly Timothy Tackett put it. Not only did the deputies meet many local lobbyists, they received a massive number of letters and local requests, and as local notables they maintained close contacts with their constituencies and used deferential language in their correspondence with their constituents: ‘I will devote my life to demonstrating my worthiness of your confidence and respect’, ‘I will submit myself, gentlemen, to your instructions. You will find me a docile pupil’, ‘I beg you to support me with your counsel and suggestions’. As if that were not enough: ‘Wherever the interests of my constituency are concerned, I will always set aside my personal opinions’.Footnote 13 These views did not differ much from those of Burke quoted above, which showed that he knew he was dealing with a pre-existing local community and professed his adherence to his constituents. Of course, political tactics played a role in this deferential language, but the deference is still striking. This deference ‘from above’ was ambiguous, just like the well-known deference ‘from below’, because representatives were always somewhat dependent on their constituencies, even if they were powerful local notables. It shows that representation was a two-way system from the start of the National Assembly in 1789 and that it needed careful maintenance on both sides. In Britain, this two-way communication has been called ‘mutual’ deference.Footnote 14 The same thing has been described for early nineteenth-century France as well.Footnote 15

Still, early nineteenth-century French parliamentarians enjoyed Burkean independence from their constituencies. After the end of the French Revolution and the fall of Napoleon, there was no return to older ideas of binding mandates or instructions from local constituencies. On the contrary, authoritative explanations of parliamentary ‘representation’ underlined the freedom of the representatives. French Prime Minister François Guizot, a theorist of representation and a doctrinaire liberal, wrote that publicity ought to provide the main connection between parliament and country. Parliamentarians should deliberate in freedom, elections were necessary but not all-important, and the press should inform the country about parliamentary proceedings as well as enlighten parliamentarians. Meanwhile, a certain distance between constituencies and their representatives was needed to allow for free debates in parliament. The ‘wrong apprehension of the word representation’ (in the sense of popular sovereignty or imperative mandates) was the source of much confusion, Guizot wrote in a section discussing Rousseau’s ideas.Footnote 16

Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, parliamentary leader of the doctrinaires during the Restoration, was even more outspoken. In the French Chamber, he famously said that representation should be conceived of as a ‘metaphor’ because, taken literally, it would have to include (pernicious) imperative mandates and the result would be a radical republic.Footnote 17 Also Prosper Duvergier de Hauranne, a younger and more progressive liberal, thought that it would be unwise to equate representation and elections. He, too, thought that representation should not be taken too literally. Besides, instead of people, ‘interests’ (as Burke and his likes would also have said) and ‘social needs’ should be represented.Footnote 18

The discussion about representation was not simply a matter of semantics. The doctrinaire interpretation of representation was directed against alternative, radical conceptions. Moreover, if representation did not imply representation of (views of) the people, it was also easier to reinforce executive government. Long before he became Prime Minister, Guizot had already argued that it was perfectly normal for the government to protect its stability by influencing the elections.Footnote 19 In practice, this meant that the Chamber contained many high-ranking civil servants, prefects and judges, who would normally support the government majority.Footnote 20 The electorate might also be in favour of such candidates because they thought these officials might be able to get their constituency a canal or a railway connection by using their connections inside the government and the administration.Footnote 21 In practice, Guizot’s top priority was executive government, and if he did not actively support the system of the ‘députés fonctionnaires’ (civil servants who were deputies, i.e. parliamentarians), he did at least condone the system and turn a blind eye to it. It reinforced the idea that his regime was dominated by electoral and other corruption. According to Victor Hugo, Guizot was personally incorruptible, but he ruled by corruption: he looked like a respectable woman who was running a brothel.Footnote 22

This was, of course, not what the high-minded advocates of proper parliamentarian representation were looking for in a representative. Local canals and railways belonged to the private or local interests which should not occupy proper politicians at the expense of national matters. The ‘most miserable local interests’ allegedly determined the vote of local constituents, who tried to get representatives sharing their own parochialism (clocher), but who did not know anything about the important affairs of state.Footnote 23 How could it possibly be otherwise, other people asked. In their own locality, nobody could see anything but that locality. You had to be ‘enlightened’ to be able to rule, and who had ever heard that the light came from below and not from above?Footnote 24 Representatives should not reproduce the local situation at the national level but rise above local limitations and prejudices. That was certainly what Guizot (and Burke) had in mind when he wrote about representation.

However, there was another side to this coin, even in France where the Revolution had made everybody think that, for better or for worse, the country had been centralised. In fact, many authors called for a revival of local ‘autogouvernement’.Footnote 25 Guizot admired the British tradition of local self-government, active citizenship and connections between the electoral system and local power.Footnote 26 On the face of it, this does not seem to have led to the protection of local traditions or a local orientation in politics, and he asserted that ‘the preponderance of local institutions belongs to the infancy of societies’.Footnote 27 However, already in the early 1820s, his friend and political ally Prosper de Barante had published a widely read book with suggestions to redress the nefarious consequences of centralisation. According to Barante, freedom implied the ability to ‘conserve one’s right’. Originally, the communes were the basis of a society of local customs, but centralisation had put an end to that world. In order to rekindle these traditions, the administration should be decentralised and local and departmental elections should be introduced. Decentralisation and local elections could build on the spirit of ‘association’, which was prevalent in local communities and would stimulate public spirit among those without access to the world of the national parliament. Guizot concurred, and wrote that the ‘reason’ should indeed come from ‘above’ (presumably the national elite), but that ‘life’ was coming from below, as a natural government that was already made and could be found everywhere.Footnote 28

When the July Monarchy was founded in 1830, it liked to show that it differed from its more conservative Bourbon predecessor. One of the first important acts by which its political nature could be determined, was the Local Government Act of 21 March 1831. The regime has always been characterised as oligarchic and bourgeois, and this democratic law has not received the attention it deserves.Footnote 29 It introduced mass male suffrage for local councils. In some cases, small rural communities virtually acquired universal male suffrage. The introduction of this local suffrage has been characterised as the ‘descent’ of modern politics into the countryside, and the ‘learning’ of modern political practices. If you look at it closely, though, it appears that this is a case of the close interconnection and mixture of ‘the old’ and ‘the new’. The new political facilities were used to express the historically inspired, communitarian and ‘unanimous’ spirit of local communities.Footnote 30

In his Recollections, Alexis de Tocqueville famously used the procession of the men of his village on election day as an illustration of the naive deference of ‘these worthy people’ (ces braves gens) who voted for him in 1848. Despite his patronising attitude—if not because of it—his Normandy constituency supported his vision of politics. It liked to be represented by a local notable with independent views, and Tocqueville’s refusal to discuss his views with republican committees was applauded as a rejection of radicalism.Footnote 31 The attitude of the local people may have reflected a conservative viewpoint but it demonstrated more than just passivity and naive deference. Despite his condescending attitude (he wrote that the elections were ‘in the hands of wood dealers and butchers’), Tocqueville knew full well that some form of reciprocity was expected from him. Just like Edmund Burke, he lobbied profusely for his local people, even before he was elected, and he also considered it his ‘duty’ (devoir) to help his constituents.Footnote 32

Given that he was a notable and an aristocrat, his fellow local citizens considered Tocqueville an obvious mediator between the local and the nation level as well as a cultural custodian of the customs.Footnote 33 However, Tocqueville’s constituency belonged to a conservative region, and other communities could be far less deferential. The popularity of petitioning demonstrates that communities could be quite assertive, and at the local elections, there were banners that read ‘no more bourgeois, long live the peasants!' (‘Plus de bourgeois, vive les paysans!’). Seen in this light, Tocqueville’s election could be interpreted as a protest against the attempt of the 1848 revolution to ‘destroy local influences and parochial interests’. In defence of local politics, commentators maintained that’the local government is in immediate contact with all citizens’.Footnote 34

The ruling elite liked to see local elections as a school for national politics. This was an idea that British commentators still shared many years later. John Stuart Mill famously praised local politics in his Considerations of Representative Government. In his top-down view ‘these local functions, not being in general sought by the higher ranks, carry down the important political education which they are the means of conferring, to a much lower grade in society’.Footnote 35 However, the local participants had their own, independent agenda. This was not the descent of modern politics into the archaic countryside, but a debate or even a confrontation between the two concepts of representation: should representatives focus on national issues and the general interest or common good, or should they cater to the needs of their constituents as men of their village or town? The contenders often experienced this confrontation as a zero-sum game, but they could have argued that vibrant politics needed both elements and that the new ‘modern’ national politics needed a substratum of local attachments.Footnote 36 To a certain extent, Guizot, Barante and others seemed to argue this, but they were not consistent, and their elitist and patronising convictions contradicted their theoretical praise for local self-government.

Local Self-Government, Corruption and Representation in Britain

The lack of real connections between the national and the local level may have been one of the reasons why the July Monarchy disappeared so suddenly in 1848, despite its success in consolidating a constitutional and parliamentary system at the national level. But these questions were not particular to France. Notwithstanding French praise for British local self-government and the subsequent British self-image of local self-government as the basis for their liberty, connections between the two levels were not easy in Britain either. Long ago, W.T.M. Mackenzie argued that a theory of British local government did not really exist and had not existed until then either. Furthermore, even though local government belonged to the articles of faith of the English constitution, ‘nothing was heard of this ancient doctrine of the constitution until after [the Reform Bill of] 1832’.Footnote 37 If we look at classic constitutional commentaries, not only the absence of local government is striking but also the condescending descriptions. Take, for instance, the widely read essay by Henry Grey about parliamentary government (1858). He refers to Burke in order to defend the conception of Parliament as a ‘deliberative assembly’ instead of ‘an assembly of delegates’. The greatest threat to the independence of the MPs—the basis of such a system—was corruption, and the most conspicuous examples of corruption were provided by ‘pernicious local influence’: the ‘chain of influence, from the elector to the Minister’ and, in the case of MPs, ‘the clamorous demands of those who have influence in the county or borough he represents’. For a minister of the Cabinet, it was better to represent ‘a close Borough’ with no real constituency and just one patron, rather than a borough subject to the pressure of ‘local interests and feelings’ that was at the mercy of ‘the mere caprice of some local constituency’.Footnote 38

Until 1832, corruption was what critics of parochialism and local oligarchy feared the most, but definitions of corruption could be rather general and might include work for local interests. Many commentators were critical about local attachments, also later. According to Henry Brougham’s account of the constitution (1861), ‘representation’ was related to the whole, and representatives were much more than mere ‘delegates’ or ‘commissioned agents’ in service of the ‘particular will’ of their small communities.Footnote 39 In The English Constitution from the late 1860s, Walter Bagehot disagreed with Brougham, whom he probably despised, but they agreed that serious representation was related to the common good. Bagehot says that owing to its admiration for local government, Britain had to put up with ‘difficulties of which abroad they [had] long got rid’. In local government ‘petty interests’ and ‘inferior abilities’ were still cherished; ‘local feeling’ was ‘older than complicated politics’, which implied that it was not a political sentiment at all.Footnote 40 Guizot had already shared this association of the local with the non-political. He was relating the local with the social roots of politics rather than with politics in general.

However, the British case shows that the local mattered, not only because MPs represented a local constituency but also because legislation was often prompted by local initiatives. In addition to the so-called public bills for the whole of Britain, ‘local and private bills’ were passed upon petition by local bodies or even individual persons. In the nineteenth century, these petitions were a British peculiarity reminiscent of the way early modern towns in many countries had acted upon requests of the local citizenry. Local and private bills linked Parliament with the localities. They underlined parliamentary sovereignty because local action required bills passed by Parliament, but they also gave localities room for manoeuvre. People thought that ‘parliament had a duty to protect local interests’ and, according to one historian, Parliament even turned into ‘a gigantic rubber stamp, confirming local and private enterprise, but rarely taking initiatives of its own’.Footnote 41 The bills were needed in main fields of local administration, such as Poor Law, public health and infrastructure. Roads, canals and especially the new railways needed private bills. In the nineteenth century, local and private bills outnumbered public bills by far. They were complicated and expensive, though, which gave rise to at least suspicions of corruption and bribery.Footnote 42

Moreover, local and private bills continued the old, apparently patchwork legislation. The Whigs who passed the Reform Bill preferred more rational and unifying legislation. They were not so much interested in facilitating the wishes of the localities, but rather in rolling out uniform national legislation. In 1836 one of the most prominent Whigs, Lord John Russell, wrote that they were ‘busy introducing system, method, science, economy, regularity, discipline’. The only problem was that they must ‘beware not to lose the co-operation of the country’.Footnote 43 He was writing to Edwin Chadwick who was a follower of Jeremy Bentham, a radical social reformer, the most important national manager of public health and poor laws in the 1830s and 1840s, and a critic of local oligarchies and local corruption favouring national arrangements at the expense of local autonomy. He trusted the government by experts and a centralised professional administration. More recent research suggests that he and his older biographers overlooked the serious problems these national arrangements encountered as well as the good done by the traditional private acts and the new Local Government Act.Footnote 44

Chadwick’s work met with much opposition and was used to glorify the national tradition of local self-government. In fact, the expression ‘local government’ only originated in the early nineteenth century because before politics had perhaps been local but officially only the King’s government existed. Critics of Chadwick regarded centralisation as the opposite of freedom because freedom rested on local self-government. Historians such as William Stubbs were arguing that the House of Commons had originated as ‘the concentration of local representation’, the Prussian historical jurist Rudolf von Gneist helped to spread the admiration for British local self-government as part of the Whig interpretation of history,Footnote 45 and self-made historian Toulmin Smith thought that local government was a necessary antidote against the development of an ‘atomised’ citizenry and society. Toulmin Smith also believed that the local community or ‘the Parish is with us the institution through which the inner life of the people is developed, and in which it should be habitually exercised’.Footnote 46 He did not really like representation, because elections once in a while could never replace the practical involvement which was only possible at the local level.Footnote 47

These ideological protests did not inhibit the actual process of centralisation. In fact, scholars now argue that Britain is today one of the most centralised countries in the world.Footnote 48 Moreover, lingering conservative nostalgia has made it difficult to see the ambiguity of local representation. A rhetoric of local customs could be an expression of local self-reliance but might also be used to maintain vested interests.Footnote 49 As I have mentioned before, however, historians have also pointed to the mutual or reciprocal nature of deference and the agency of the local people involved, mainly in Britain but also in France. This agency involves the allegedly subordinate voter demonstrating a ‘determination to maintain his self-respect’ and a ‘willingness to know his place but to maintain it on the most advantageous terms possible, even to the point of resisting political direction’.Footnote 50 (Local) politics entailed ‘negotiation rather than clientage’.Footnote 51

This perspective could also question the connection between the nationalisation and democratisation of politics. Chadwick, along with those who shared his views, was convinced that you needed national initiatives to defeat local corruption and oligarchy, and to a certain extent, he was probably right. However, democracy in the sense of participatory politics, engagement and agency of the common people, may have depended much more than he realised on the local situation and the wish to preserve ancient rights. In their petition against the Municipal Reform Act (1835) the freemen of Oxford argued that they should keep their electoral privileges, ‘which the Petitioners submit are as much their undeniable Right as any kind of private Property’. Even petitions in favour of the act supported the restoration of rights and they requested that the House should ‘enact such laws as will give the Petitioners the power to elect their own magisterial and local authorities’.Footnote 52 It has been argued that the broadening of electoral representative politics came at the price of ending an older vernacular, demotic culture of popular politics.Footnote 53 This latter form of politics was local and continued to exist for much of the nineteenth century, even if representative institutions and the elective principle became the rule.Footnote 54

The continuity of local electoral behaviour was striking.Footnote 55 The ‘party’ was becoming more important, but the parties depended to a large extent on local organisation. Many things now happened at the national level, but the local remained important, even for MPs who seemed to convey the message that their work was based in London. If it is true that British Parliament was more popular than other parliaments in the nineteenth century, this had a lot to do with the remaining connections with the local level. The passing of private legislation had continued the tradition that ‘Parliament was the petitioner on behalf of the people’.Footnote 56 In their constituencies, ordinary local citizens felt entitled to participate in election meetings and electoral battles over seats in parliament, regardless of suffrage rights. Perhaps they had also learned to play by the rules of national politics but they did so, at least partly, on their own terms. The local ‘community’ was central to these electoral battles, even if the community was hardly unanimous. As Frank O’Gorman puts it: ‘the conflict between oligarchy and independence was the ideological core of electoral activity’.Footnote 57

The Local Dimension of Politics: Parochialism, Oligarchy, Private Interestand Democracy

If local politics were so important and if they were a means for ordinary people to express their needs, why was there not more theoretical support for the local dimension of representative politics? The answer to this question can perhaps be captured in two words: parochialism and oligarchy. Nineteenth-century modernisers promoted liberty and agency, and they thought that local politics was parochial and a matter of local (i.e. petty) interest. Even those who applauded the principle of local self-government, as Burke and Guizot did, favoured national politics in practice. Their more theoretical ideas about representation also neglected the local dimension. Local government was almost by definition associated with (old) corruption—see, for instance, Henry Grey. Until the Reform Bill of 1832, local government seemed to be in the realm of oligarchy. National politicians often did not seriously oppose oligarchy at the local level or they thought that it was too radical and therefore dangerous. Radicals, such as Chadwick in England, considered local government an obstacle on the road to (national) democracy and rational executive government.Footnote 58 The radical John Roebuck believed that it was best to keep himself ‘as much aloof as possible from all merely local politics’ (the word merely is significant here).Footnote 59 Given that defending local autonomy was often inspired by conservatism and the desire to maintain the traditional power of the landed aristocracy, the progressive currents of liberalism and radicalism attacked the prestige and power of local government.

In a (western) European context, it might be hard to imagine that local government could not only provide elementary political schooling for plain and ordinary local citizens but that it could also be the basis for a bottom-up democracy, or even that a bottom-up democracy could be a good thing at all. In Europe, locality, aristocracy and conservatism seemed to be too closely intertwined, but in America, things looked different: there was no aristocracy and less deference. It is unsurprising that Tocqueville discovered the importance of local government to democracy there. He did not quite romanticise or idealise local government, but he thought that it provided a useful tool to unite ‘a particular interest to the general interest’. It was an advantage that local politics started in your own backyard. That was what made it so concrete, practical and straightforward. Of course, you needed the central government to protect individual rights and freedoms and moderate ‘the despotism of the majority’, but local communities were the substratum you needed for healthy politics. You needed the engagement and participation that only local politics could provide for everyone.Footnote 60 In Britain, the idea that a form of ‘nimbyism’ might have fuelled awareness of Parliament in the nineteenth century has only recently been put forward, but Tocqueville already advocated a ‘démocratie de proximité’.Footnote 61

Tocqueville’s interest in local politics was inspired by Guizot’s ideas about self-government, but their perspectives differed quite dramatically. Guizot abhorred democracy and thought that representative politics needed distance; Tocqueville realised that (democratic) politics needed distance and proximity. The combination of both local and central/national politics could, in his eyes, provide both. Tocqueville himself offers a fine example of how difficult it was to practice these ideas, as is shown by the aforementioned story in his Recollections about his electoral experience as a local notable and aristocrat.

Most nineteenth-century reformers wanted to escape the limitations and parochialism of local communities. They were trying to separate private and public interest, and parliamentary politics revolved around the representation of the common good or the general interest. They thought that local politics was about local interest i.e. private interest. What you needed was ‘public spirit’ and patriotic virtue.Footnote 62 The idea of private interest triggered the association of local affairs with ‘corruption’. Therefore, the proximity of local politics was a problem, not a solution. Representing interests was not in itself a problem: the ‘general’ interest was fine, and Burke and others argued that the representation of the various nationwide interests (landed, commercial etc.) was the purpose of Parliament. The representation of local interests, however, could be tolerated in practice (e.g. lobbying was condoned) but it should not be the overarching intention or the purpose of parliamentary politics.

Public vs. Private Law and Interest in the Netherlands

The Netherlands offers a striking case of the juxtaposition of private local interest and the public interest of national representative politics, as demonstrated by the dominant politician of his age, Johan Rudolf Thorbecke (1798–1872). Thorbecke was educated as a classicist and philosopher and became a professor of constitutional law at Leiden University. In the 1840s, he turned to politics and became the main architect of the constitution of 1848, introducing a liberal system of ministerial responsibility and direct parliamentary elections. As constitutional doctrinaire liberals, he and Guizot were kindred spirits, but there was a crucial difference: the revolution of 1848 unseated Guizot and ended his political career, whereas the upheaval of that year brought Thorbecke to the fore and was the real beginning of his political career.Footnote 63

Although Thorbecke was a constitutionalist and an executive politician, the Dutch conservative establishment deemed him at first a dangerous radical. As a self-made man and son of a father who went bankrupt, he intensely disliked the old oligarchy. His aim was systematic and rational administration, based on indiscriminate and objective criteria. No privileges anymore for the old elite. The main tool of his politics was the law (the calling of the state was to be a community of law or ‘regtsvereeniging’) and the great project of his life was to discriminate between public and private law.Footnote 64 This was in line with liberal projects elsewhere and hardly anybody anywhere questioned the public nature of the nation, as opposed to the private nature of local affairs. This was a feature of liberal and Whig politics in general, but Thorbecke was an extreme case. He despised everything that resembled privileges, private acts or common law. Politics and the state were matters of public law, and he used the uncommon word ‘staatsburgerschap’ (citizenship of the state) to underline that he was interested in the state as the focus of the general interest. No matter what he said, he did care much less for local citizenship. It is true that he cherished the old republican ideal of active citizenship in your own environment, but his famous Local Government Act (1851), which would last until the 1990s, included local government in a top-down structure and was mainly intended to execute national laws. The act erased differences between cities, towns and rural communities: they were all municipalities (‘gemeentes’) now.

Thorbecke also proposed a new Poor Law. He did not succeed in converting his Bill into the Poor Law that he wanted, but his ambitions were clear: he wanted to organise care for the poor through a national scheme and put an end to the dominant role of religious corporations and local peculiarities. His new Election Act was also meant to promote engagement with national and general interests, as opposed to the private and local interests. The new constituencies or electoral districts were deliberately large and not designed to fit historical communities. His conservative opponents accused him of deliberately destroying local bonds and obstructing bottom-up self-government. They argued that historical communities had agency because they knew how to work together. Artificially created electoral districts would be mere tools in the hands of national politicians. According to these conservatives, the state rested on a combination of pre-existing local communities. Conservative parliamentarians quoted Tocqueville’s argument that involvement in local politics was a great introduction to politics, but they said that Thorbecke was only interested in centralisation and an all-powerful state.Footnote 65 Thorbecke did not agree. He wanted to remove custom from the localities because it inhibited the development of local self-government. His ambition was to free the potential of active citizenship buried within traditional communities ruled by old oligarchies, whether this be small towns, villages or the capital Amsterdam.

Thorbecke has always been regarded as one of the most important statesmen in Dutch history because he led the Netherlands to modernity and parliamentary democracy. His new constitution and the ensuing new laws remained the framework for societal developments for a long time, and the idea that citizenship should primarily be citizenship of the state went largely unopposed. The liberal dominance met with opposition but liberals successfully—and with good reason—framed conservative criticism as protection of petty local interests. The Thorbeckean idea of representation was a clear example of the doctrinaire liberal predilection for distance, independence and separation between public and private law and interests. Representatives should take public opinion into account but should make up their mind independently through parliamentary discussion.

Connections with the constituency seemed to be unimportant. Nevertheless, Thorbecke remained in close contact with many of his adherents and did what it took to be re-elected. Since he was quite well-known nationally, he was not dependent on just one constituency. Over the years, he was elected in different parts of the country. Many of his followers were local worthies, who depended on their good relationship with their particular constituencies, and their constituents definitely expected something in return for their support. A famous example is the way the railway system was set up. A government led by one of Thorbecke’s opponents decided that construction work would be carried out through the state instead of through a private initiative, as proposed by Thorbecke. Individual liberal representatives were offered railway lines or stations that benefited their constituencies. In practice, local interests still mattered a great deal, but contemporaries and later historians alike saw these interests as self-centred obstructions to the general interest. It became almost impossible to defend them in theory. It was argued that the public domain should be separated from local and private interest.

From the 1870s onwards, the aloof liberal concept of representative politics was increasingly subject to criticism in the Netherlands from many sides, but not from the local level. Proximity was considered in ideological rather than local terms. Religious parties argued that church and religion were what really mattered to common people, and orthodox Protestants in particular promoted political agency and engagement on this basis. A few years later, socialists were claiming that liberalism ignored the practical day-to-day worries of the common people. They wanted to be closer to their adherents than the bourgeois liberals had been. These views were signs of the approaching advent of ‘party democracy’, which would be based, in the Netherlands as elsewhere, on ‘social identity’ and a likeminded ‘community’.Footnote 66 Until the middle of the nineteenth century, political controversies revolved around local communities and identities, but now political discussions revolved around ideological or religious communities. In the twentieth century, local communities still existed but their representational function had diminished. Whereas nineteenth-century essays about representative government routinely included the local level in their discussion of private as opposed to public interests, late twentieth-century overviews of the public/private divide completely ignored the local dimension. The local level simply did not seem to matter anymore.Footnote 67

Meanwhile, the idea of representation was moving from the ‘trustee’ conception of virtual representation, as advocated by Burke, towards the ‘delegate’ conception of someone who represents a group s/he is part of. The most spectacular change was the increasing role of political parties, but the delegate conception also affected the way independent parliamentarians conceived of their work. Until recently, historians had hardly noticed the rise of a new type of constituency politician. They did not see a new practice or conception of representation that was worth studying in its own right, except perhaps in Britain, where it was less new. In Britain, analysts have paid some attention to the ‘two dimensions of representation: their national dimension which focusses on policy opinions, and their constituency dimension which focusses on redress of grievances’.Footnote 68 Redressing grievances, which had in a way always been part of what MPs did, did not necessarily have general policy implications. According to one MP, it was ‘not so much that they particularly want you to put their views over, but rather that when something goes wrong there is somebody who will shout for them’.Footnote 69 It turns out that quite a number of continental late nineteenth-century parliamentarians thought it was their duty to serve the direct and personal needs of their local constituents and to redress grievances. To a certain extent, Burke had already been a constituency politician, but the redress of grievances was now part of a somewhat new concept of what it meant to be a representative. Parliamentarians started to keep track of the services they had rendered and they built an archive of letters received from their constituents. Clearly, they consciously cherished a new sense of proximity with their local voters. This happened in different countries, even in the Netherlands, which would abolish the local constituencies and introduce a national proportional system.Footnote 70 After the Second World War, and in particular since the 1960s, British MPs have spent an increasing amount of time on constituency work.Footnote 71

Conclusion

Why was it so difficult to take into account the local dimension of national politics for those who did not want to voice conservative views? Before 1800 and throughout the nineteenth century, hardly anybody would have denied the practical importance of this local dimension. Still, this dimension was mainly theorised as belonging to the past. According to mainstream conceptions of parliamentary representation, such as those of Burke, Guizot and Thorbecke, the nation was the realm of ‘public’ matters. In comparison, the local seemed to be home to parochialism, private interest and a conservative landed aristocracy. Historically, the local seemed to be dominated by private interest, followed by the national, public and general interests, which would incorporate the local into a broader community. According to Guizot, the role of local communities was particularly connected to the ‘infancy’ of societies, and he used this word eighteen times in his history of representative government.Footnote 72 Local ties were a necessity, but theoretically speaking they seemed to be atavistic.

Seen in the light of this linear historical succession, a parliamentarian focus on the public interest seemed to be an unmistakable sign of progress. Politics appeared to be a zero-sum game: either you concentrated on the public interest or you were a prisoner of retrograde and petty local, private interest. It was acknowledged that a vibrant representative system needed independent representatives as well as active, engaged local citizens, but this acknowledgement did not lead to new ideas about representing the local level. It is significant that most of the theorising about the role of parliamentarians was done by (former, actual or aspiring) members of parliaments who, of course, valued their independence.Footnote 73 For instance, in 1838, the Speaker of the House of Commons still saw it as his duty ‘to shut out as far as might be all extrinsic pressure, and then to do freely what was right within doors’.Footnote 74

In practice, ‘territorial representation was taken to be self-evident'Footnote 75 and the representative system also continued to be, or became, the focus for political mobilisation and engagement of local citizens. In the short term, the local dimension of representation was crucial to maintaining the two-way nature of parliamentary representation, also as a system of ‘direct personal relations of mutual regard’Footnote 76, and in the long term, this dimension became the starting point for many forms of ‘modern’ political engagement in parties and elsewhere. Since theories of representation initially focussed on the independence of parliamentarians, and subsequently concentrated on the role of political parties, the proximity between representatives and people in the local context did not often receive the attention it deserves. Today, new ideas about the role of proximity in representationFootnote 77 allow us to look back to the beginning of the nineteenth century and underline once more the continuity of local ties, and the relevance of this continuity to theoretical ideas of parliamentary representation. Without these ties, the representative system would have been left hanging in the air. Besides independence, the public interest and distance, the system also needed proximity. At that time, local communities provided that proximity.