Author-Meets-Critics: Daniel Carpenter’s "Democracy by Petition"

Session Submission Type: In-Person Author meet critics

Session Description

With democracy under global threat, it is vital to reconsider what constitutes democracy and its arrival. Focusing upon the contributions of marginalized peoples and their interaction with political elites through petitioning, the new book Democracy by Petition contributes to comparative politics discussions of democratization, grounds the political theory of representative democracy in a particular institution, and reshapes our understanding of American and North American political development. The book examines democratizing moments in Canada, Mexico and the British West Indies, as well as among Indigenous Nations, in addition to the United States. The book interprets North American petitioners as democrats and democratizers, arguing that important reforms such as suffrage rights expansion, the elimination of feudal tenure, the creation of select but vital Indigenous reservations and rights, and the entry of women into the North American public sphere happened as much through petitions as through elections and parties.

The book and this discussion fit well with the APSA conference theme of Promoting Pluralism, as petitions were a mode of democratization that protected and promoted diversity while advancing different forms of democracy. Indigenous peoples, Black men and women, Hispanos and genízaros, French Canadians as well as White Americans drew powerfully upon new forms of petitioning to advance the struggle for greater political equality. They fashioned more diverse agendas through collective petitioning, they used petitions to recruit and organize politically, and they advanced a more democratic political cultural as the officially equal and diverse voices of petitioners on paper drew millions of people into politics who were not previously welcome there.

Democracy by Petition introduces and advances a different notion of representative democracy, one based upon the necessity for a quotidian technology of communication between people and officeholders, a technology which North American peoples harnessed and appropriated for democratizing purposes. It also represents a decades-long research effort to collect petitions databases, linking qualitative and quantitative studies. The panel will be useful for scholars of international history and politics because of the group’s focus on (1) non-U.S. developments, particularly in Canada, where the mass petitioning efforts of French Canadians influenced both U.S. activists and the English Chartists; (2) international religion and politics, including the dramatic entry of Mexican women into national politics in the 1850s La Reforma period; (3) transnational and international Black political action, not only in American cities (Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York) but also the British West Indies, and (4) Indigenous Nations and their skilled use of petitioning as a way of making political and legal claims and of organizing opposition to settler government projects. It will also be useful for those wishing to bring petitions data into their research across the political science discipline.

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Chair

• Robert C. Lieberman Johns Hopkins University

Presenters

• Christopher S. Parker University of Washington

• Frances E. Lee Princeton University

• Daniel P. Carpenter Harvard University