Public lecture by Prof. Pasi Ihalainen: "Merging conceptual and digital history to study the transnational evolution of parliamentary democracy"

How has the meaning of ‘democracy’ evolved across time and borders? This lecture brings together conceptual and digital history to explore the shifting definitions of ‘representative democracy’ and the challenges it has faced in different historical and regional contexts. By combining close textual analysis with large-scale data-driven methods, it traces how parliamentary debates have served as arenas for ongoing contestation and redefinition.

Drawing on the extensive People & Parliament database—including the open-access Dutch corpus at UU I-Analyzer—the underlying study employs digital tools to systematically analyse parliamentary discourse across ten national contexts since the nineteenth century, as well as within the European Parliament since 1999. Through computational text-mining, long-term shifts in democratic discourse are identified, while qualitative, contextual analysis of key speech acts reveals how MPs have actively shaped and responded to transnational political debates.

Join us for a discussion that not only maps historical transformations in democratic thought but also highlights the complex interplay between national traditions and broader European and global conversations.

Pasi Ihalainen is an Academy of Finland Professor at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, and has been a visiting professor at the universities of Freiburg, Gothenburg, Leiden, Uppsala, and Utrecht. He has published widely on the history of political discourse and the conceptual history of nationalism, internationalism, democracy, and parliamentarism since the eighteenth century, applying comparative and transnational perspectives. He currently serves as the President of the Association for Political History. His work on parliamentary history and democracy includes Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685–1772 (2005); Agents of the People: Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800 (2010); and The Springs of Democracy: National and Transnational Debates on Constitutional Reform in the British, German, Swedish and Finnish Parliaments, 1917–1919 (2017). He is currently writing the book Towards Representative Democracy: A Conceptual History of Claims, Tensions, and Parliamentary Self-Definitions in Northwest Europe, a comparative and transnational conceptual history that combines text-mining and close reading of parliamentary debates from nine countries since the early nineteenth century.

The lecture is organized by the Political theory research group at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies, University of Tartu.