UAntwerpen, Stadscampus, S.SJ.024
Wednesday 11 December 2024, 13:00-15:00
During this PoHis seminar Pasi Ihalainen (Academy of Finland Professor and President of the Association for Political History) will give a presentation, entitled "Merging conceptual and computational history to study the transnational evolution of parliamentary democracy."
Abstract
Building on our previous research on the history of democracy by conventional methods, this paper suggests ways to merge conceptual and computational history to study the transnational evolution of parliamentary democracy. Conceptual history leads us to analyse ‘democracy’ as a contested and historically changing concept, focusing on multi-layered meanings attached to ‘representative democracy’, and considering different challenges to democracy in different eras and countries. Computational history supports a systematic, data-driven analysis of competing redefinitions of democracy with help from an exceptionally large comparative database (People & Parliament) that provides parallel text mining tools for national datasets from ten countries since the nineteenth century as well as the European Parliament. We thus combine the quantitative text-mining of big data to discover patterns of diachronic change in discourses with qualitative, contextualizing analysis of selected speech acts.
We see debates in national and transnational assemblies as meeting places and analytical nexuses for discourses on democracy moving in societies, contributed to by the claimed representatives of the people. Parliamentary debates provide sources on ongoing transnational discussions on making democracy work, democracy being constantly redefined by MPs in interaction with transnational, public and academic debates.
The paper offers four case studies demonstrating the potential of our approach. Firstly, we look for patterns across multiple time series datasets, suggesting that there has been a strong linkage between the political discourses in parliament and the quality press as well as synchronicity in the intensity of debates on democracy between various countries. Secondly, analysing the ideologically divided concept of democracy in the wake of the Second World War we show how West European trends can be seen also in postwar Finland, association between democracy and parliamentarism being exceptionally strong and reflecting defences of Western parliamentary democracy against Communist challenges and Finlandization. Thirdly, our analysis of democratic discourses in the aftermath of 1968 reveals both conceptual extension to new domains and expansion in the sense of proceduralization and abstraction, democracy becoming seen both as a hegemonic concept and a dynamic process. Fourthly, our analysis of the legitimization of representative democracy since 1990 illustrates a transnational participatory turn, representative democracy being redefined by MPs towards greater transparency, accountability, responsibility, pluralism, inclusivity, and citizen participation. Time allowing, we will also reflect on methodological prospects for future research.