(De)Politicizing the Digital Transformation - Computationally Assessing Issue Dynamics in European National Parliaments

The integration of digital technologies into various aspects of life, referred to as the “Digital Transformation”, presents significant challenges and opportunities for society and the economy. The issues associated with this transformation confront existing policy frameworks and necessitate continuous adaptation to accommodate emerging technologies. Current debates on AI regulation illustrate the complexities in aligning legal frameworks with technological advancements. Political science has focused on how political parties have integrated digital transformation into their agendas since the late 2000s, showing increased mentions and subject diversification in party manifestos. Despite these efforts, the role of parliamentary actors in shaping the digital transformation discourse remains underexplored and comparative studies on the subject are rare. Focusing on national parliamentary discourses on digital transformation in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden from 2015 to mid-2022 and utilizing newly compiled and machine-translated parliamentary corpora, the study employs a policy-specific dictionary to track digital transformation issues and clusters the latent themes through topic modeling. The analysis reveals significant variations in how countries integrate the digital transformation into political agendas. German political actors, particularly since 2017, demonstrate high attention to these issues, while other countries show lower salience and depoliticization. Topic modeling identifies ten shared themes in parliamentary debates, with convergence on issues like cybersecurity and digital education but divergence in areas such as digital infrastructure and privacy, hinting to the relevance national contexts significantly influencing topic salience and the framing of debates. Common themes include digital education and infrastructure, with data protection and privacy being particularly salient in Germany and the Netherlands. AI emerged as a shared topic, with varying national emphasis on innovation, international politics, and secure implementation. The study suggests further research to examine the effects of politicization and depoliticization of the digital transformation on legislative outputs and policy outcomes, utilizing a comparative policy integration framework to explore emerging policy regimes and their impact on national political structures.