‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’ Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
This hard to read image from Google Ngam shows the use of the term liberal democracies in books from 1860 to the present, You can see can see how little the term was used in the past. There was an acceleration during the Second World War and then usage just jogged along before an exponential acceleration during the 1980s. Usage then stabilised before exploding again in the 2000s.
According to Wikipedia, the term has a long history, but it's also one that I have rarely used. For most of my life I have referred just to democracy with a special focus on parliamentary democracy. Occasionally I have referred to Western democracies, but a search on the blog shows that I have used the term liberal democracies just once in several thousand posts and then in passing.
No doubt this reveals that I am out of touch. I went to Wikipedia to review the term and was surprised somewhat at the analysis. I felt that the term had become an ideological label whose meaning was in fact uncertain and indeed confusing.
I then did the Ngam analysis just to check usage, This suggested that the increased usage of the term has been directly bound up with particular events. I'm not sure where I go with this. I just wanted to record the information.
9 comments:
How does this graph deal with any underlying increase in the volume of the corpus over time?
Sorry premature comment because I couldn't read the scale on the image you gave. GFoing to the source I see now it is a percentage scale.
'democracy' as a noun I think I have a reasonable understanding of; but 'liberal' as an adjective seems very slippery in useage between, for example, Aus and USA - and I assume that flows into publications forming the ngram database?
I don't really find it helpful as a distinguishing qualifier.
kvd
Hi marcellous. I left the left hand scale out for space reasons. That was an error!
I think so, kvd, although it's become a slogan/label, a short hand time. IO don't think that it is a useful qualifier unless the usage is very carefully defined.
Good to find you are still writing Jim. I agree with your comment that the modern day usage of the term liberal democracy has an ideological edge. To my mind an edge that differentiates it from Parliamentary democracy.
Hi John and thanks. My writing has collapsed at the moment.
Most importantly you haven’t Jim.
Thanks, John! Writing underway again :)
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