This paper evaluates the usefulness of resorting to “models of democracy” and their classifications for empirical works on public discourses about democracy, paying special attention to an ongoing project that analyses the use and meaning of the concept of democracy in the Spanish press. First, this contribution will evaluate how the literature on models of democracy can contribute to the construction of coding frames. Second, it will show the difficulty to find anything similar to "models" in daily discourse due to the abundance of vague, tacit and legitimizing uses of the concept, but also some ways in which theoretical models become indispensable tools in order to interpret and engage with the findings.
