Talking About Democracy? A Comparative View of Discourses in the European Union and Armenia, Belarus, and Ukraine

This working paper examines how democracy is discursively constructed and strategically mobilised by symbolic elites in the European Union and three Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries: Armenia, Belarus, and Ukraine. It explores whether a shared democratic discourse exists across these contexts and how convergence or divergence reflects underlying geopolitical dynamics and patterns of norm diffusion. Methodologically, the study combines cross-country comparative discourse analysis with norm diffusion conceptual framework, focusing on how officials, politicians, and civil society actors in the EaP reproduce, adapt, or resist EU-promoted democratic norms. Drawing on a corpus of 237 texts (2014–2024), it employs actor-centred coding and intertextual analysis – paying particular attention to discursive positioning and the modality-evaluation gap – to reveal how institutional asymmetries and geopolitical pressures shape the uptake and transformation of democratic language.