SCAS Conversations -
Parliaments, Political Communities, and the Tensions of Representative and Democratic Government
SCAS Fellow Paul Seaward and SCAS Short-term Researcher Pasi Ihalainen discuss how their separate projects on the history of parliaments and parliamentarism illuminate the relationship between people, political elites, and our understanding of democracy.
Paul Seaward is Emeritus Director, The History of Parliament Trust, London, and SCAS Fellow Spring 2026. He currently works on political assemblies in Europe, exploring how traditions of assembly governance have developed in different countries in dialogue with each other and within their varying institutional and social contexts.
Pasi Ihalainen is Professor of Comparative European History at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and Short-term Researcher at SCAS Spring 2026. As Academy of Finland Professor, he currently studies the history of representative democracy and especially tensions between parliament and the people between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.
Event information
- Date:
- Time:
- to
- Location:
- The Green Room Library, 4th floor, Linneanum