Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 58, 2018 183 Harm Kaal The Voice of the People Communicative Practices of Popular Political Engagement in the Netherlands, 1950s–1960s * This article discusses how interaction between politicians and the people shaped Dutch political culture in the 1950s and 1960s. First, a range of communicative practices will be mapped through which politicians and the people interacted, practices to which historians have hitherto paid scant attention in their studies on post-war political history: the letters citizens sent to politicians, their notes placed in suggestion boxes, surveys that polled ­popular opinion and the questions people addressed to politicians live on television. I will analyse how, through these practices, both politicians and the people they represented ar­ticulated new notions of democracy and political representation. Second, based on a unique set of sources – the letters people addressed to Prime Minister Jo Cals after his forced resignation in October 1966 – I will delve deeper into the question of how citizens made sense of politics and political representation amidst this transformation of Dutch political culture. Historians interested in studying the participation of citizens in modern parliamentary democracies have hitherto focused mainly on collective forms of political engagement. In a recent study, the history of democracy is defined as a»history of practices that were of ­ten used simultaneously in order to organize democracy«, which suggests that practising democracy was a collective act. 1 For much of their historical trajectory, parliamentary de­mocracies have indeed been marked by a culture of popular participation through collec­tive action and mass mobilisation. For one, the rise of parliamentary democracy as a po­litical system in the 19th century was connected to the activities of voluntary associations that»stimulated citizens to redefine their relation to the state, forge new political identi ­ties and negotiate the boundaries of what was considered politics«. 2 Moreover, towards the end of the 19th century, mass political parties emerged across Europe and soon s­tarted to dominate parliamentary politics. 3 Political participation beyond the institutional frame­work of party and parliament has been mostly studied in its collective, activist forms, such as(mass) demonstrations, strikes and petitions. 4 In recent scholarship, the history of col­lective political participation is often narrated as one of decline. Political parties in par­ticular have supposedly lost their status as trustworthy intermediaries between politics and the people and have merged with the state to such an extent that it is hard to distinguish * I would like to thank the participants at the Autorenworkshop in Berlin, November 2017, as well as the editors of the»Archiv für Sozialgeschichte« for their valuable feedback. Thanks also go to Paul Reef for his assistance in data collection. 1 Henk te Velde / Maartje Janse , Introduction: Perspectives on Political Organizing, in: id. (eds.), Organizing Democracy. Reflections on the Rise of Political Organizations in the Nineteenth Cen ­tury, Basingstoke 2017, pp. 1–18, here: p. 2. 2 Ibid. 3 Bernard Manin , The Principles of Representative Government, Cambridge / New York etc. 1997. 4 Matthias Reis (ed.), The Street as Stage. Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century, Oxford / New York etc. 2007; Lisa Keller , Triumph of Order. Democracy and Public Space in New York and London, New York 2009; Belinda Davis , What’s Left? Popular Political Participation in Postwar Europe, in: AHR 113, 2008, pp. 363–390; Stefan Jonsson , Crowds and Democracy. The Idea and Image of the Masses from Revolution to Fascism, New York 2013.