Recent decades have seen an uptick in anti-democratic rhetoric and disinformation on various online discussion forums and across different social media platforms. Research offers increasingly accurate tools for identifying these phenomena.
Should Finns be worried about the state of democracy? “Here in Finland, we are perhaps taking the stability of our democracy a bit too much for granted, and that, at least, is something to be concerned about,” political scientist Kimmo Elo says.
“Often, we fail to notice small and gradual changes that erode the foundations of our democratic system.”
Researchers are now seeking to address these slow shifts by analysing public discourse on democracy with the help of deep learning algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Elo leads a work package in the Resilience of Liberal Democracy in Finland (RESLIDE) project, which develops digital tools for detecting discursive structures, shifts, transitions and disruptions in public discourse on democracy more rapidly than before.
“I would argue that there is a lack of research that allows us to observe changes in discourse on democracy and examine them from multiple angles. Our research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence democracy and people’s attitudes towards it.”
Often, we fail to notice small and gradual changes that erode the foundations of our democratic system.
Kimmo Elo
University Lecturer
How does public discourse influence people’s perceptions of democracy?
The models developed in the project will be trained on broad and multidimensional datasets that contain excerpts from Finnish public discourse from the 1970s to the present. The data include, for instance, governmental policy documents on democracy as well as materials produced by the media, such as news and stories published by the Finnish Broadcasting Company Yle, the country’s leading newspaper Helsingin Sanomat and the weekly news magazine Suomen Kuvalehti.
The researchers will spend the next three years collecting and classifying material and training the models.
“We start by laying a solid foundation for our work. After that, we can begin our analysis and incorporate other open datasets, such as various democracy indicators.”
As the research progresses, changes in Finns’ perceptions of democracy, as observed in democracy indicators or survey data, can be compared with the longitudinal dataset produced in the project, making it possible to identify how democracy has been discussed in public, and how this may have influenced people’s views.
“The easiest way to understand Finnish democracy is to rely solely on individual democracy indicators. However, these are often based on expert surveys, but most indicators focus on institutions, not on discourses or other, ’soft’ factors.”
The project focuses particularly on liberal democracy, which encompasses, among other things, free and fair elections, party competition, freedom of expression and freedom of the press. Senior Researcher Jenni Karimäki has analysed academic literature for elements associated with liberal democracy.
Based on this classification, the researchers can observe whether various dimensions of liberal democracy are discussed positively or negatively. This enables them to link individual arguments present in public discourse more broadly to the different dimensions of liberal democracy.
“Our qualitative research approach allows us to identify the extent to which civil society is prominent, and which of its dimensions are discussed and which are not,” Kimmo Elo explains.
The researchers are keen to roll up their sleeves to see what Finnish democracy discourse is made of.
“My feeling is that elections are rarely seen as a problem area. Today, there is much discussion about the rule of law, and it will be interesting to see how this discourse evolves over time.”
Data-driven research gains ground in the humanities
So far, artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms have been used only to a limited extent in political science.
“In the digital humanities, however, the study of various large text corpora has become increasingly popular in recent years. This has been driven by methodological advances as well as improved access to digital materials that can be converted into a machine-readable format.”
In the coming years, a research infrastructure for the digital humanities will be established at the University of Eastern Finland, bringing together researchers from the humanities, social sciences and data science. Elo is launching the initiative together with Professor Mikko Laitinen, with the aim of making this expertise more widely available to researchers.
“Data-driven research is a growing trend in the humanities, so we will need even more capacity to harness data in the future.”
We will need even more capacity to harness data in the future.
Kimmo Elo
University Lecturer
Deeper insight into the origins of democracy-undermining rhetoric
Liberal democracy stands at the core of Elo’s RESLIDE project, with liberal democracy being challenged by the far right globally in recent years.
“Within the radical far right, there are forces that would like to see a return to a simplified form of democracy, without the prefix liberal.”
Far-right rhetoric targets, for example, minority rights and gender equality.
“More broadly, it targets developments that have gradually gained ground within liberal democracies, making, for example, Finnish society today more diverse and strongly liberal in values.”
According to Elo, the phenomenon is well known, but its underlying causes and mechanisms remain largely hidden. The new project seeks to gain a deeper understanding of the kinds of situations that give rise to discourse that questions democracy or is even anti-democratic.
“By asking people about their perceptions of democracy, we learn what they think at a given moment. However, I do not believe that every citizen has a readily formulated view of democracy. Rather, people start reflecting on these issues when they pop up in public discourse.”
According to Elo, public discourse around migration is one example. Finns began to engage with the topic only after it became more prominent in the media.
“Ten years ago, Finns were – apart from certain groups – not particularly worried about national debt. However, over the past five years, the fiscal sustainability gap has featured prominently in the news, stirring concern.”
Once the project concludes, the data generated will be made as openly accessible as possible to other researchers, and to the public, too. The project’s codebook will be published in open access, allowing researchers, for instance, to assess the project’s findings based on the classifications made and to use them in their own work.
“When the project ends, we will make our trained models openly accessible, in line with good scientific practice, so that others can use them for identifying and classifying different dimensions of democratic discourse,” Kimmo Elo says.
The findings will also be disseminated to schools by providing them with a new type of democracy knowledge bank. According to Elo, schools already have high-quality materials on the subject.
“When we talk about democracy, we are talking about a fundamental phenomenon. If we fail to socialise children and young people into supporters of democracy during their school years, that will be very difficult to change later.”
Easing citizens’ access to reliable sources of information
Elo points out that Finns’ knowledge of policy issues is generally good. However, a study conducted at the turn of the decade showed considerable differences between socio-economic groups.
“People’s knowledge of politics begins to diverge after comprehensive and general upper secondary school. Those who are not interested in politics can quite easily avoid engaging with societal debates.”
The tools developed in the project aim to address this challenge, providing citizens with easier access to reliable sources of information.
“These kinds of measures strengthen the foundations of democracy because the less people know about things, the easier it is to spout false claims.”
Another aim is to counteract rhetoric that ignores facts and distorts the picture of how the Finnish political system functions and what its current state is. If citizens lack the ability to recognise disinformation and rhetoric that undermines democracy, over time they may no longer be able to distinguish truth from falsehood.
“And that’s when we are on thin ice, as this erodes trust in science, in the media and even in interaction between people. The greatest and most dangerous threat lies in us beginning to question everything because we no longer know if something is true or not.”
This story is part of UEF Insight, the University of Eastern Finland’s new online magazine exploring current issues and emerging phenomena. To read all stories, please visit uef.fi/insight.
