Extension or Expansion? Quantitative Conceptual Analysis of Parliamentary Uses of “Democratic” in Sweden and Britain, 1950s–1990s

Scholars have argued that following 1968, the idea of democracy was extended into new domains in Europe. To assess this, we focus on how MPs qualified phenomena as “democratic” in Britain and Sweden. We use word embeddings to automatically locate words whose contextual similarity to “democratic” decreased or increased. We combine this with bigram analysis, manually classifying word pairs including “democratic.” Our results partly lend credence to the “extension thesis” but also detect an “expansion of democracy” regarding democratic principles, as well as procedures and practices. This nuances the importance of the 1970s as a turning point and highlights larger shifts in the concept of democracy, namely its increased abstractness and proceduralization.