The aim of this paper is to examine “the political” as a concept and label in two major Swedish newspapers from 1945 to 1989. This is often described as a time of both political stability and political disruption. The “death of ideologies” in the 1950s, and the idea that politics could be reduced to administration, was replaced by a radicalization in the 1960s and an expansion of the political concept (“the personal is political”) – followed by a limited interpretation of politics in the neoliberal 1980s. These discursive waves have previously been traced by scholars examining individual genres, such as cultural debates and editorials. With digitized newspapers available in full text we can trace key concepts wherever they appear, analyze the themes they are connected to as well as quantitative changes over time. Which themes became political during the period? How were political themes connected, and which themes were more frequent in specific newspapers?
“Politics” and “political” are key concepts. Following the theoretical tradition of conceptual history, key concepts are those that are contested and yet inescapable. To define them, restrict, expand or challenge their meaning and use, is part of a political struggle. To redefine key concepts, such as the “political”, is a way to redefine social reality, to interpret and frame it, and perhaps legitimize goals and point out the necessity of certain actions. Politicization refers to the process when boundaries are redrawn and new issues and topics are introduced on the political agenda. Labeling something as “political” is an important part of the process.
To examine these processes we use topic modeling (Mallet’s implementation of Latent Dirichlet allocation), an efficient way to study themes in a large corpus by transforming words that co-occur in documents into clusters of words (topics). Our material consists of all text blocks (derived from the digitization process at the Swedish National Library) containing the word political (in Swedish “politisk”, “politiska” or “politiskt”) in two major newspapers (Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter).
Preliminary findings show a plethora of themes being politicized and depoliticized in the post-war period – environmental issues, gender equality and sports, just to mention a few. Other findings point to the rise of alternative arenas beyond the newspaper pages, such as theaters and street protests. Examining text items beyond the canonical genres also makes it possible to identify political labels where they are less expected – in personal ads where people wanted future partners with “political awareness”.