The ‘Democracy Tree’: analysing dimensions of democracy from online data in 93 countries using a distributional semantic model

Survey studies the last decades show that popular support for democracy is very strong both in democratic and non-democratic countries. Naturally, the question has been raised if democracy actually means the same thing in different linguistic, cultural, and political contexts. To explain how and why popular understandings of democracy vary between countries, individual-level factors as well as the impact of the economic, political and cultural contexts are put forward. Mass media is often mentioned as decisive in forming citizens understandings of democracy, but the media discourse and its content are rarely in focus in comparative studies on popular conceptions of democracy. This article contributes to the contemporary debate on the meaning of democracy by analysing data collected from online news and social media in 93 countries based on geo-coded language. In relation to previous research our main contributions are three: (i) our analysis shows that the media discourse revolves around democracy as a system of governance, democracy as outcomes and democracy as values, and we add new dimensions to these abstract categories constituting what we call a ‘democracy tree’; (ii) we show that the media context is related to popular understandings of democracy; and (iii) our results indicate that the different dimensions of democracy exist in the media discourse in all or most parts of the world. On a more abstract level there are common denominators of the D-word across the globe, but when analysing the dimensions in more detail, the thought of finding common denominators vanishes.