Taking the Measure of Social Democracy: Exploring the Ideology of the Socialist International through Topic Modeling

This article investigates the political culture of European social democracy at the beginning of the Cold War by analysing the debates inside the Socialist International to define a socialist identity. There is a rich historical literature on what role European social democracy played in the origins of the Cold War, but combining digital history with a transnational approach can produce new insights into this key research question. The rarely explored Socialist International offers the best opportunity to experiment with new tools. The organisation, to which most European socialists belonged, allowed them to coordinate their activities and reach an agreement on ideas and strategy through debate. For this purpose, the Socialist International published a journal in the late 1940s and a book in the mid-1950s, to which most parties contributed articles or chapters. These collections are representative of the political culture of European social democracy at the time, so they provide a great opportunity to analyse transnational debates. In the era of mass parties, examining the ideology of a few great thinkers or top leaders is not enough; political culture is better expressed by myriads of speeches and articles produced by low-ranking party officials and journalists. A comprehensive analysis is beyond traditional textual analysis, but digital history is particularly suited for this purpose, as quantitative text analysis can reveal hidden similarities and underlying tensions within the social democratic culture. This article relies on new data specifically digitised for this article: the texts produced by the Socialist International for the public at large from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s. While it is a small corpus, it is comprehensive. The possibility of combining close and distant reading allows us to test which instruments of corpus linguistics are best suited to study the political culture of mass movements. This article employs topic modeling to reveal not just what were the main interests and concerns of social democrats at the time, but also differences among parties and the existence of subgroups within the socialist family. The results will allow to enrich the narrative of how European social democracy acted at the beginning of the Cold War, from the descent of the Iron Curtain, to the intense bipolar tension to the first steps in decolonisation and European integration.