Plastic Politics

This article investigates politicisation and depoliticisation in post-war Dutch democracy by analysing debates in the Dutch House of Representatives between 1945 and 1994. While examining the language of Dutch parliamentarians, it uses theories of conceptual history and computational text analysis to study ‘conducive abstraction’ and ‘plastification’ as forms of, respectively, conceptual politicisation and depoliticisation. I model these processes to show how individual terms politicise or depoliticise, and how conceptual politicisation and depoliticisation unfold, accelerate and decelerate over time. As such, I show that studying the changing form of ‘the political’ can be done at scale. In doing so, I provide a richer account of politicisation and depoliticisation in post-war Dutch politics, one that has often been presented as a sequence of pacified depoliticisation in the 1950s, progressive politicisation in the 1960s and 1970s and neoliberal depoliticisation in the 1980s and 1990s.