8 Postwar Popular Politics: Integrating the Voice of the People in Postwar Political History

Both inside and outside of academia, a declining trust in politicians and the rise of populism has catalysed a debate about a supposed “crisis of democracy.”1 Political decision-making has increasingly escaped public control, particularly at the level of the European Union. The public sphere spiralled into decline when citizens turned into passive consumers who focused on private instead of public concerns.2 Moreover, with the laws and mechanisms of the mass media dictating political communication, parliamentary democracy has transformed into a mediacracy or drama democracy. Against this background, populist politicians have emerged on the scene, promising to restore the power of the people. One should, however, be careful not to integrate populist notions of crisis and of confrontation between political elites and the people into the historical analysis of political representation. We argue that at the heart of the discourse of crisis is a lack of understanding of the multifaceted ways in which politicians and the people have interacted. In this chapter, which is based on a case study of the Netherlands, we first offer a reconceptualisation of the notion of popular politics by mapping the repertoire of communicative practices through which political representatives and the people they represented have interacted in the postwar years. Second, we zoom in on one of these practices: letters people sent to their representatives. The analysis will be aimed at identifying popular perceptions of political representation that were articulated in these letters. Third, we end by offering a way forward for historical research on the interaction between politicians and the people. The vast scholarship on political representation in parliamentary democracies has been mostly oriented towards the “formal” aspects of political representation treating it as a status that results from particular political procedures and constitutional arrangements with research being dedicated to an investi-