Chapter 3 focuses on the challenges and opportunities of transnational worker representation and their consequences for the development of more democratic governance institutions. We examine these from two key theoretical perspectives. Starting from the notion of associational democracy, we differentiate between two logics of democratic representation: representation as claim versus representation as structure. The first approach is associated with a discursive or communicative model of transnational democracy as put forward by political theorists. Rather than thinking of representation in terms of representative structures, representation becomes the dynamic and ongoing process of making “representative claims” that reflect certain discourses, categories, concepts, judgments, dispositions, and capabilities. In contrast, structural ideas of representation are grounded in industrial democracy. Here, constituents of an organic political unit defined by voluntary membership, such as a trade union, authorise their representatives to deliberate, negotiate or bargain on behalf of members. We develop their theoretical grounding in structuralist and post-structuralist thinking, and question to what extend these approaches may be reconciled with each other to advance prospects for transnational worker representation.

Nineteenth-century MPs spent a significant proportion of their time presenting petitions and corresponding with petitioners. Petitioning and the interactions between petitioners and parliamentarians was an important component of how representation worked in practice. This chapter first examines the shift in how parliamentarians conceived petitions from an eighteenth-century system of ‘virtual representation’ to embodying aggregated popular opinion. The chapter then examines petitioning and the practice of representation. While not everyone had the right to vote, parliamentarians believed that all subjects had the right to be represented through the presentation of their petitions. The correspondence between MPs and petitioners provided a forum to negotiate the meaning of representation. Parliamentarians sought to uphold their independence in the face of petitioners demands to present and support their requests. Finally, the presentation of petitioning was a mechanism for geographic but also issue-based representation. Overall, the interaction between parliamentarians and petitioners provides new insights into the shifting relationship between politicians and the people. More broadly, it focuses attention away from theories of representation and electoral or formal representation to a wider concept of the culture of representation within a given polity.

An examination of the practice of petitioning at the grassroots level shows how it stimulated a vibrant popular politics. Revisionist scholarship emphasising the supposed taming or disciplining of political culture has ignored the lively local culture of petitioning. The chapter first outlines the process and practice of petitioning: the drafting, signing, and presentation and reception of petitions. Of all these different stages in the process of petitioning, it was the practice of signing petitions that was most important to nineteenth-century popular politics. Not only did it underpin other forms of political activity, such as public meetings, but opened up new informal spaces for political activity and engendered new forms of political behaviour. The practice of petitioning stimulated a never-ending cycle of claim and counter-claim about the forging of signatures, the undue influence of landlords or employers, and outright misrepresentation. This endless contestation was intrinsic to the practice and process of petitioning and one of the most important ways in which it energised popular politics at the local level.

This chapter examines the self-descriptions used by petitioners when addressing Parliament. Through these labels, petitioners forged and asserted their collective identities and made claims on the state and the wider political community. Petitions did not merely reflect existing identities, but actively constituted them. The chapter first examines the broadening of the petitioning public. There was a shift from the typical mode of self-styling used by eighteenth century petitioners, which reflected perceived economic interests and the hierarchical structuring of local communities, to demotic, ostensibly egalitarian labels such as ‘inhabitants’ in the nineteenth century. The second half of the chapter examines how Catholics, Protestant Dissenters, and women, came forward as petitioners to claim rights and assert their collective identities. Supporters, opponents, and parliamentary advocates interpreted petitions in favour of Catholic emancipation as representing Irish Catholics as a collective force. Dissenters asserted their collective identity as petitioners claiming civil rights, but also in presenting themselves as moral authorities. Finally, women became more forthright in claiming rights as ‘women’ rather than limiting their interventions to moral and religious issues permitted by the norms of Victorian gender ideology.

Several recent elections – including the Brexit referendum – suggest a looming disconnection between political representatives and citizens. This perceived gap in representation gives fuel to populist parties, who claim to speak on behalf of the people suffering under the rule of disregarding elites (see Chapters 9 and 13). While representation used to be the solution to large-scale democracy, today it would seem, it is precisely what is causing problems to democratic societies all over the world (see Chapters 2 and 15). There is therefore an urgent need to acquire more knowledge about the dynamics of the relationship between the elected representatives and the people they represent.