Measuring Commitment to Ideas Through Discourse Networks: Analysis of the Debate on EU's Democratic Reform

Although it has been widely acknowledged that actors’ commitment to ideas studied in dynamic perspective can give valuable insights into the outcomes of the political process, tools for measuring it quantitatively and continuously were missing. The paper introduces a measure that allows to investigate diversity, consistency, and coherence of an actor’s repertoire of ideas through discourse networks. The measure provides a novel way to operationalize actor’s commitment to ideas by integrating the general-purpose loyalty measure into the system of discourse network analysis (Leifeld 2016). Due to a complex and flexible structure of the measure, it allows to place relations between an actor and each particular idea in the context of both their current and previous systems of ideational commitments. This gives an opportunity to map an actor’s repertoire of ideas attaching ‘weights’ to each of the elements and see whether these ideas form a coherent belief system. Aside from the opportunity to trace the development of individual actor’s ideologies the measure allows to explore how ideas are formed and developed as webs of interrelated ‘elements’ of meaning (Carstensen 2015). Analysis of the media debate on the EU’s democratic deficit presented in the paper demonstrates the value added by the application of the measure to an understanding of how actors use different ideational elements in political discourse and how the idea of European democracy is (re)structured in the process of public communication.