In this project, we investigate the development of ideas and practices that were presented and functioned as alternatives of established parliamentary forms of democracy in Western Europe since 1880, as well as the practical development of alternatives to parliamentary democracy in the Netherlands since 1945. We thus aim to serve three goals: to re-orient the historiography of democracy in the Netherlands, by focusing on democratic forms outside the established form of parliamentary democracy, and to connect this alternative history to a European-wide debate on the development of these alternatives; to probe the potentials and limits of alternative practices of representation and regulation in the Netherlands since 1945, both independently and in relation to established parliamentary forms of democracy; and to investigate the relationship between conceptualizations and evaluations of forms of democracy and their institutionalization.

Project Leader & Researcher

NWO grant