Democratic Stability as Conceptual Convergence

• In Event: The Origins and Precariousness of Democracy: Historical Perspectives

Abstract

Democracy is famously an “essentially contested concept”. Indeed, debates over the meaning of democracy are at the center of contemporary political theory. Similarly, research on public opinion has turned in recent years to study citizens’ understandings of democracy and how they relate to other political attitudes. Underneath this renewed interest in the meanings of democracy is the fact that political actors from all stripes—from the Chinese Communist Party to the populist far-right— repeatedly refer to democracy to legitimate their views and actions, even when such views and actions very evidently violate democratic principles.
In this paper, we examine how the use of the term “democracy” amongst political elites in six countries changed over the past two centuries. We argue that convergence amongst political elites on the meaning of democracy is central to democratic stability. Conversely, periods of political instability are marked by greater contestation over the meaning of democracy.
To evaluate this claim, we leverage new annotated corpora of parliamentary debates in the United Kingdom (1832 to the present), United States (1873-2010), Canada (1900-present), France (1870-present), Sweden (1870-present), and Mexico (1870-present). Drawing on computational text analysis, specifically word embedding techniques, we estimate differences in the way individual legislators used the term democracy in their speeches in each legislative period. We then use these measures to analyze (1) patterns of semantic convergence and divergence amongst legislators over time; (2) whether these patterns followed party lines or not; and (3) whether these patterns were driven by the election of new kinds of actors or by processes of ideological change among veteran legislators. Finally, we analyze the substantive content that characterized periods of consensus or dissensus around the term “democracy”.
Preliminary results from the UK, US and Canada suggest that legislators in these countries largely used the term democracy in similar ways during the nineteenth century, at least in the US and the UK, for which we have nineteenth-century data. This consensus was shaken from around the turn of the century -—largely due to the rise of labor and working-class representatives—- to the 1970s, when we find again evidence of conceptual convergence in all three countries. More detailed analyses indicate that, in the three countries, the semantic differences observed during the first half of the twentieth century were associated with competing normative ideals related to democracy. However, starting in the 1970s, these normative disagreements around democracy became less common, and the use of the term by legislators increasingly converged around concrete procedural and institutional affairs. Finally, we observe some indications of renewed divergence in the usage of “democracy” in legislative speeches after 2010, especially in the UK in the context of debates around Brexit.

Authors

• Agustin Alonso Goenaga Orrego, Lund University

• Dylan Pashley, Lund University