The Right to Political Participation and Representation

This chapter examines how active citizenship or political participation, and representation were understood in Europe from the early sixteenth century to the mid seventeenth century. There are two central arguments which I put forward and seek to defend it what follows. First, there was a noticeable shift from direct participation to representation as the main form of political involvement during this period. Second, and more importantly, whereas in the early part of the period political participation was understood mainly as a duty, by the mid seventeenth century, when representation was conceived as the chief form of participation, it was increasingly comprehended as a right. The chapter begins by discussing Niccolò Machiavelli’s notion of direct participation of the people, before moving to Northern Europe, where the idea of active citizenship was understood in more restrictive terms. Shunning popular political participation, citizenship was reserved for the elite.