On 7 February 2025, Pasi Ihalainen (Professor of Comparative European History at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland), discussed merging conceptual and digital history to study the transnational evolution of parliamentary democracy.

This guest lecture was hosted by the Centre for Digital Humanities at Utrecht University.

Abstract

Building on our previous research on the history of democracy and parliamentarism by conventional methods, this paper suggests ways to merge conceptual and digital 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. Digital history supports a systematic, data-driven analysis of competing redefinitions of democracy with help from an exceptionally large comparative database (People & Parliament, the Dutch corpus of which is open at UU I-Analyzer) that provides parallel text mining tools for national datasets from ten countries since the nineteenth century as well as the European Parliament since 1999. 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 introduces several case studies demonstrating the potential of our approach. Time allowing, we will also reflect on methodological prospects for future research supported by AI and LLMs.

About

Pasi Ihalainen is Professor of Comparative European History at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, concentrating on the history of political discourse in the long term and from comparative and transnational perspectives. Currently, as an Academy of Finland Professor at the Department of History and Ethnology, he studies the history of representative democracy and especially tensions between parliament and the people between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, combining quantitative and qualitative methods to analyse digitised parliamentary debates from nine Northwest European countries. His previous research topics include political pluralism, parliamentarism, nationalism and internationalism. Professor Ihalainen is a member of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters.