A Populist Democracy? – conflicting 19th C. Danish concepts of Democracy

In the last decades, much attention has been paid to tensions between representative democracy and rising populist movements (among others, Müller, 2017; Urbinati, 2019; Mudde, 2004). However, there are historical cases where populist movements have contributed to the development of representative democracy. This paper aims to contribute to the history of democracy as it argues that a populist logic strongly influenced the development of the Danish concept of democracy in the 19th Century. The paper intervenes in current scholarly debates on the conceptual history of democracy (among others, Innes & Philp, 2013, 2018, 2023; Kurunmäki et al., 2018), as it emphasizes the usage of the concept among non-intellectual, rural actors – a population group that has been overlooked in the literature. I argue that the conceptual innovations made by a popular peasant-farmer movement (1830-1870) were pivotal to the creation of modern Danish representative democracy. The paper will investigate the early struggles over the construction of a representative political system in Denmark, 1830-1870. Using Ernesto Laclau’s theory on populism (Laclau, 2005), I will argue that early Danish democrats built a populist political identity around the concept of democracy. This populist-democratic identity was developed in opposition to contemporary liberal conceptions of democracy (Nevers, 2011). Using a conceptual history approach, the paper will examine these conflicting concepts of democracy applied in the early history of the representative political system in Denmark. The liberal concept of democracy appears in the writings of an urban, well-educated elite, which dominated parliament through most of the 19th Century (Bagge, 1970; Nevers, 2011; Jørgensen, 2023). The competing populist concept of democracy was developed by a popular peasant-farmer movement that fought for political inclusion and representation. The paper will discuss how different interpretations of democracy reflected different understandings of good political conduct. The populist-democratic identity conflicted with liberal ideals of deliberative, representative politics that were dominant in Denmark and Europe more broadly (Steinmetz, 2001; Johansen, 2019). I argue that struggles on the concept of democracy were central to conflicts on how the representative political system should be constructed. Under the banner of a populist-democratic identity, the peasant-farmer movement introduced a number of political practices that later came to be associated with representative democracy: political parties as the basis for parliamentary life, election platforms, the attempt to represent certain social classes, and secret voting strategies in parliament. The paper will thus discuss how the concept of democracy was used to and has influenced the construction of a representative political system in Denmark. I argue that rural actors are overlooked but essential contributors to the history of modern representative democracy. And further, that a populist logic was built into one of the competing concepts of democracy when the concept was popularized in Denmark in the 1840s (Nygaard, 2011; Nørgaard, 2019). I conclude that this populist concept of democracy became dominant in Denmark in the latter half of the 19th century. Investigating the complex history of democracy and populism may help us nuance our understanding of the current challenges facing representative democracy.