Zachris Haaparinne

Zachris Haaparinne (PhD, MSSc, MA) is a postdoctoral researcher, specialised in parliamentary representation, British political culture (during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in particular), and discursively oriented methods and theoretical approaches. He is currently working in Pasi Ihalainen’s Academy of Finland Professor Project (Political Representation: Tensions between Parliament and the People from the Age of Revolutions to the 21^st Century), responsible for the People & Parliament interface.

His doctoral dissertation (Voice of the People or Raving of the Rabble? Petitions and Disputes on Political Representation in Britain, 1721-1776) addressed the discursive means eighteenth-century petitioners used to increase the pressure on members of Westminster parliament, sometimes outright challenging their independence. Based on a corpus of around five hundred petitions published in pamphlets and the press, the dissertation focused on discursive patterns found in petitions as a genre. In his current project, Haaparinne focuses on how Westminster parliament debated petitions and petitioning during the long eighteenth century, with a special emphasis on the rise of arguments centred around the idea of scale (Language of Scale: Parliament, Petitions, and the Changing Perceptions on Representation, 1689-1832).

In addition to addressing representation through petitioning, Haaparinne has also elaborated Michael Saward’s notion of representative claim-making—grounded in the idea that representation is a continuous process of presenting claims of representation—from a historical and empirical perspective. His forthcoming article discusses how claims of acting on behalf of past and future generations have been operationalised in the realm of politics.