Purpose: How democracy is understood depends on the theoretical perspective applied. Even so, public library research often takes the concept of democracy for granted. This article explores how democracy is theoretically understood in recent research on public libraries and their role in democracy, including the focus and design of this research, and the key contributions made.

Design/methodology/approach: In a comprehensive review of scholarly literature published between 2010 and 2024 and focusing on public libraries and their importance for democracy, 85 articles were selected and included in a conceptual analysis.

Findings: The analysis shows that three groups of theoretical perspectives on democracy are commonly represented in public library research: Habermasian consensus-oriented views on democracy, a Mouffean conflict-oriented view of democracy, and democracy understood in relation to social capital. The Habermasian and Mouffean views on democracy are the most widely used, indicating an Apollonian and Dionysian duality in recent public library research.

Originality/value: This study is the first large-scale systematic review explicitly categorising and analysing perspectives on democracy in public library research. Implications for library practice and suggestions for future research are presented.

This paper investigates how cultural institutions are symbolically and rhetorically mobilized within far-right culture war discourse. Focusing on YouTube, the study examines how public libraries and museums are incorporated into far-right conspiracy narratives. The empirical material consists of 3,549 videos from 11 Swedish far-right YouTube channels, collected via the YouTube API. A subset of eight highly viewed videos, all addressing libraries and museums, was selected for qualitative multimodal analysis. This is complemented by a quantitative topic modelling analysis of the broader video corpus.

Preliminary findings indicate that librarians and museum professionals are portrayed as tools, victims, or occasional as agents within far-right conspiracy myths, such as “the deep state” and “the great replacement.” The contested concept of institutional neutrality is strategically employed to legitimize these narratives. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how cultural institutions are appropriated in far-right media ecosystems to support broader conspiratorial and political agendas.

This article reports conclusions from a three-year research project on Swedish public libraries. The focus of the project is on librarians experience of libraries mission to promote democracy when democratic norms and values are challenged politically by radical right populism. Results of a longitudinal survey point to stability and lack of political interest over time, but increased societal polarization causes several ethical dilemmas for librarians. Examples of illegitimate political influence and librarians adapting to changes in the political climate call for renewed discussions on the professional role and understandings of democracy in library practice.

In Sweden, the growing influence of the far-right has turned cultural institutions into political symbols in an emerging ‘culture war’ (Harding, 2021). Carlsson, Hanell & Hansson (2022) show how digital forums and social media play a significant part in orchestrating the ideologically laden conflicts and confrontations that public cultural institutions are currently facing. Digitally mediated threats from the far-right may obstruct the statutory mission of these institutions to promote democracy, but knowledge about how such threats develop and unfold, as well as the relation between online interactions and offline events (Scrivens, Davies & Frank, 2020), is lacking. The Cultural Institutions and the Culture War (CICuW) project aims at exploring the online discourse surrounding cultural institutions in far-right contexts in order to produce knowledge regarding possible connections between online interactions on the topic of libraries and museums, as well as offline events at these institutions.

The project has previously conducted a pilot study on materials from far-right news sources (Hanell et al. 2025), but is now expanding into materials collected from YouTube (3571 transcribed videos from 11 channels) and the Swedish web forum Flashback’s Culture and Politics sub-forum (6638 posts) from Språkbanken Text (2025). The proposed paper will focus on the overview of the materials which will later be used to identify patterns of discourse for further qualitative analysis. The overview makes use of BERTopic (Grootendorst, 2022) to produce clustered topics from the materials while a NLPTown multilingual BERT model (Peirsman, 2020) is used to perform sentiment analysis.

Using these two modes of analysis, the overview is intended to indicate commonly occurring positive and negative topics, as well as showcase platform-specific trends that may indicate broader or narrower discourses surrounding libraries in the materials. This overview is then supplemented by zero-shot classification using KB Labs Megatron BERT model (Sikora, 2023) for initial dynamic scoping of relevant materials. Initial findings indicate that topics involving libraries and museums often position them as arenas for broader political discourses, where the actions of different political parties are framed as setting the agenda for cultural policy. This is in line with previous research on how libraries and cultural institutions figure in the culture war (Usherwood and Usherwood, 2021).

Furthermore, the far-right’s usage of social media platforms and online content creation has previously been indicated as an especially important component of the mainstreaming and dissemination of the ideology (Ekman, 2014; Munn 2020; Sakki & Pettersson 2016). The CICuW project’s overview of far-right content discussing cultural institutions thus become an important addition to our current understanding of how social media is used by the far-right to frame and build opinion on cultural policy, as well as regarding public cultural institutions. While the earlier pilot project conducted on far-right news media indicated some recurring patterns of discourse (Hanell et al. 2025), the expanded scope of the now broadened dataset will allow for further insights into the nature of the broader discourse. In addition, the inclusion of multiple platforms that are used in different registers and predominantly used for different forms of media (articles, forum posts and videos) makes for an important contribution towards the discussion on how far-right ideology proliferates in different environments.  

Works cited: 

Carlsson, H., Hanell, F., & Hansson, J. (2022). ”Det känns som att jag bara sitter och väntar på att det ska explodera”: Politisk påverkan på de kommunala folkbibliotekens verksamhet i sex sydsvenska regioner. Nordic Journal of Library and Information Studies, 3(1), 26–43. 

Ekman, M. (2014). The dark side of online activism: Swedish right-wing extremist video activism on YouTube. MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research, 30(56), Article 8967. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v30i56.8967 

Grootendorst, M. (2022). BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.05794 

Hanell, F., Carlsson, H., & Ihrmark, D. (2025). Exploring culture war related attacks on public libraries: results from a pilot study on information activities of the far-right. Information Research, 30(CoLIS), 344–365. https://doi.org/10.47989/ir30CoLIS52333 

Harding, T. (2021). Culture wars? The (re)politicization of Swedish cultural policy. Cultural Trends, 1–18. 

Munn, L. (2020). Angry by design: Toxic communication and technical architectures. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 7(1), 1–11. 

Peirsman, Y. (2020). nlptown/bert-base-multilingual-uncased-sentiment [Computer software]. Hugging Face. https://doi.org/10.57967/hf/1515 

Sakki, I., & Pettersson, K. (2016). Discursive constructions of otherness in populist radical right political blogs. European Journal of Social Psychology, 46(2), 156–170. 

Sikora, J. (2023). The KBLab Blog: Swedish zero-shot classification model. KBLab. https://kb-labb.github.io/posts/2023-02-12-zero-shot-text-classification/ 

Språkbanken Text. (2025). Flashback. Språkbanken Text. https://doi.org/10.23695/YKK8-7D22 

Usherwood, B., & Usherwood, M. (2021). Culture wars, libraries and the BBC. Library Management, 42(4–5), 291–301. 

Introduction

The political successes of the far right have been identified as one of the most significant political shifts of recent decades (Rydgren, 2018; Mudde, 2019; Norris & Inglehart, 2019). At the heart of this transformation is the cultural sector, where institutions such as museums and public libraries have become increasingly politicized and turned into ideological symbols within an intensifying "culture war" (Harding, 2022; Hanell, Carlsson, & Engström, 2023). Recent research shows how librarians face pressure from politicians and the public to cancel LGBTQI-themed or multicultural events. Additionally, hate speech and harassment from far-right sympathizers have led to instances of self-censorship among library professionals (Carlsson, Hanell, & Engström, 2023). This trend poses a significant challenge to the promotion of core democratic principles within the cultural sector, including freedom of speech and the free formation of opinions, thereby threatening democratic governance itself.

Furthermore, authoritarian values and political parties gaining ground raises questions regarding the challenges that this development implies for cultural policy as a political area. Liberal democracy and welfare-state structures still serve as common foundations for the Nordic countries. However, the effectiveness of liberal democratic states in addressing societal challenges is increasingly being called into question, prompting claims of a crisis in liberal democracy (Mounk 2018; Norris & Inglehart 2019). An increasing number of politicians and citizens are engaging in establishment critique, questioning the role of experts and the autonomy of culture from politics. This occurs at the same time as the tone in public discourse, particularly online, is becoming increasingly polarized and heated. This increasing polarization, arguably reinforced by the affordances of digital technology, presents new challenges to cultural institutions, to the field of cultural policy and thereby also to cultural policy research.

This panel seeks to address these issues by critically exploring new ideas, concepts, approaches and methods, that facilitate novel insights into practical as well as scholarly challenges arising from this ongoing political development. Bringing together key researchers, theorists, and practitioners in the field of cultural policy research from three Nordic countries, the panel provides an opportunity for discussion and critical reflection on central questions and the broader impacts of the culture war, along with its associated issues and challenges across the region. Driving questions for this panel include:

•What potential implications does the culture war, along with the rise of authoritarian values and political parties, hold for cultural institutions and cultural policy as a political field?

•How can cultural policy research address questions and challenges raised by this development?

Panel Outline

The panel will start with a brief overview by the moderator introducing the topic of the panel and the challenges it aims to tackle, centering on the culture war, the crisis of liberal democracy, and the rise of authoritarian values and political parties. After the introduction, each panelist will present a lightning talk, focusing on, but not limited to addressing the driving questions. After the lightning talks, the moderator will present a short reflection and summary of the presentations which each panelist will be invited to discuss and respond to. During the final part of the panel, the moderator and panelists will engage the audience with a wider discussion on questions raised by the proclaimed crisis of liberal democracy, the culture war, and the rise of authoritarian values and political parties.

Panelist Perspectives

Hanna Carlsson, Linnaeus University, Sweden

Carlsson will serve as the moderator for the panel as well as 1) introducing the topic through presenting findings from recent research on cultural institutions and the culture war and 2) presenting concluding observations that particularly seek to answer the second driving question.

Lisa Engström, Lund University, Sweden

Since the 1980s, tolerance has increasingly become the response when the rights of minorities are attacked by right-wing radicals. Intolerance is also highlighted as one of the major threats to liberal democracy. In her lightning talk Engström will argue that the dichotomy of tolerance/intolerance as central to the so-called culture war. But is tolerance the answer when right-wing radicals threatens minorities? Tolerance involves a power dynamic where one party, the majority, tolerates while the other, the minority, is tolerated. Tolerance means enduring the undesirable. This also makes the tolerant person virtuous, someone who endures. Thus, tolerance brings boundaries. According to the doxa of today, who should we tolerate? And who are “we” who tolerates?

Fredrik Hanell, Linnaeus University, Sweden

Hanell will present a lightning talk addressing the second driving question, with particular focus on how we can go about studying the interplay between online antagonistic discourse of the far right and on-site attacks on cultural institutions. Previous research has studied these aspects separately, and there is also a significant lack of research that investigates how digital media plays a part in constructing cultural institutions as ideological symbols for the far right. The context of cultural institutions and the online culture war discourse offer a methodologically and empirically compelling starting point for exploring the interrelatedness of on-site experiences and hostile online discourse.

Nanna Kann-Rasmussen, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

The culture war reflects the growing polarization in society, placing cultural institutions in a contested and precarious situation. In her talk, Kann-Rasmussen will explore how authoritarian values may thrive on perceptions that these institutions are overly left wing or "woke." Cultural institutions have never been neutral, but when they work at arm’s length from politicians, it is crucial that they maintain public and political trust. For this reason, the cultural war underscores the need to revisit the policies and governance models that define both institutional autonomy and public accountability.

Håkon Larsen, OsloMet, Norway

Larsen will present a lightning talk addressing how the left in Norway is responding to the US imported culture wars, and how this affects how controversies over freedom of speech and the arts play out in the public sphere.

References

Carlsson, H., Hanell, F., Engström, L. (2023). Revisiting the notion of the public library as a meeting place: challenges to the mission of promoting democracy in times of political turmoil. Journal of Documentation. Vol. 79 no. 7. 178-195.

Hanell, F., Carlsson, H., Engström, L. (2023). The public library as a political symbol: a post-political reading of the demise of the consensus-model in Swedish cultural policy. The International Journal of Cultural Policy, 30(7), 899–913.

Harding, T. 2022. “Culture Wars? The (re)politicization of Swedish Cultural Policy.” Cultural Trends 31 (2): 115–132.Mounk, Y. (2018), The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save it, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MT.

Mudde, C. (2019). The far right today. Cambridge: Polity PressNorris, P. and Inglehart, R. (2019). Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and authoritarian populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rydgren, J. (2018). “The radical right. An introduction.” In Rydgren, Jens (Ed.). The Oxford handbook of the political right. Oxford handbooks online, Oxford University Press, pp. 1-14.

Introduction. This paper reports initial findings from a research project focusing onhow information activities of the far-right promoting ideologically motivatedpressure and threats against cultural institutions develop, spread and unfold, thelogic governing these attacks and how they affect public libraries and librarians.

Method and analysis. The project employs the theoretical framework of practicetheory and a netnographic approach. The paper outlines the project and reports theoutcomes of a pilot study using data-driven digital methods and content analysis toanalyse digital interactions from a Swedish far-right media outlet.

Results. The findings from the pilot study indicate that online information activitiesof the far-right display a view of public libraries as leftist and as potential threats tothe nation, echoing ethnic nationalism and authoritarian views commonlyassociated with the far-right.

Conclusions. Indications that librarians, as civil servants, are increasingly the targetof ideologically driven threats and antagonisms warrant further scholarly attention.The pilot study reflects how quantitative procedures are necessary for the analysisof large amounts of data, but the functionality of the digital methods need to betested and adjusted according to context, and qualitative approaches are necessaryfor a nuanced and contextual understanding.

Low-code tools play an important role in making data analysis and visualization accessible to researchers and students with limited experience, or interest, in programming. While low-code tools do introduce closedbox issues, they can still be considered important stepping stones toward computational approaches. This chapter draws on two such tools, Octoparse and KNIME (Konstanz Information Miner), to present a workflow from data collection from online sources, through text pre-processing, toward text classification in the context of the ongoing project Cultural Institutions and the Culture War (CICuW) that investigates the democratic implications of the pervasiveness of farright digital discourse. This chapter will introduce web scraping, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis in an accessible way, while also showcasing state-of-the-art approaches to the analysis components through the use of BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) models and zero-shot classification. The chapter will take a critical perspective on the described methods by discussing how they contribute to creating methodological closed-boxes and how quantitative techniques can be fruitfully combined with qualitative approaches.

In Sweden, the growing influence of the far-right has turned cultural institutions into contested political symbols within an emerging “culture war,” where digital forums and social media play a central role in fueling conflicts and threats that challenge these institutions’ democratic mission ([1], [2]). Despite this, there is limited knowledge about how such digitally mediated threats develop and how online discourse relates to offline events [3]. The Cultural Institutions and the Culture War (CiCuW) project addresses this gap by examining far-right online discourse about libraries and museums to better understand its potential connections to real-world confrontations, building on insights from a prior pilot study of far-right news sources [4]. Presented at HiC 2024, the initial workflow for the pilot consisted of a shareable KNIME workflow which integrated resources via multiple different extensions, and which would go on to form the basis of a chapter in the upcoming Huminfra Handbook on web scraping and text mining.  

However, as the project progressed beyond the initial pilot phase, the workflow changed drastically. Encountering issues  with resource compatibility, expanded demands from the inclusion of new data sources, and the rapid development of Swedish-context resources, the project turned into an exploration of the limitations brought on by the use of low-code tools beyond simply contributing to closed-box methodologies [5]. The proposed project will map the changes in the workflow from the pilot study to the current iteration of the project and contextualize those changes in the developing Swedish digital landscape in order to provide a further reflection on the uses and limitations of low-code tools as an introduction to digital methods for humanists based on previous examples [6].

[1] Harding, T. (2021). Culture wars? The (re)politicization of Swedish cultural policy. Cultural Trends, 30(1), 1–18. 

[2] Carlsson, H., Hanell, F., & Hansson, J. (2022). ”Det känns som att jag bara sitter och väntar på att det ska explodera”: Politisk påverkan på de kommunala folkbibliotekens verksamhet i sex sydsvenska regioner. Nordic Journal of Library and Information Studies, 3(1), 26–43. 

[3] Scrivens, R., Davies, G., & Frank, R. (2020). Measuring the evolution of radical right-wing posting behaviors online. Deviant Behavior, 41(2), 216–232.

[4] Hanell, F., Carlsson, H., & Ihrmark, D. (2025). Exploring culture war related attacks on public libraries: Results from a pilot study on information activities of the far-right. Information Research, 30(CoLIS), 344–365. 

[5] Tyrkkö, J., & Ihrmark, D. (2024). Low-code data science tools for linguistics: Swiss army knives or pretty black boxes? In S. Coats & V. Laippala (Eds.), Linguistics across disciplinary borders: The march of data (pp. 40–66). Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350362291.0008 

[6] Ihrmark, D., & Tyrkkö, J. (2023). Learning text analytics without coding? An introduction to KNIME. Education for Information, 39(2), 121–137. https://doi.org/10.3233/EFI-230027 

This paper presents an analysis of how library professionals in Sweden and Denmark perceive the democratic role of the library profession in the polarised political landscape of today. Relating to research on the democratic role of libraries, professional ethics and cultural policies, empirical data was gathered through seven group interviews with library professionals from eleven local libraries in south Sweden and Jutland in Denmark. Results indicate a commonly perceived discrepancy between general formulations of values found in professional codes of ethics, and practical librarianship. Dealing with threats and challenges against liberal democratic values in the public library requires professional ethical considerations that in individual cases may question the need for value-neutrality among library professionals if the basic democratic mission of the library is to be upheld.

As the growing influence of the radical right turns cultural institutions into political symbols (Harding, 2021), online forums and social media are key venues for antagonistic outbursts directed at public libraries (Carlsson, Hanell & Hansson 2022). Trolling the Library aims to explore radical right digital attacks against public libraries, and is currently piloting different methods to analyse online comments and news items from the website SamNytt. This contribution outlines one intended deliverable of the project: a shareable workflow for the low-code tool KNIME (KoNstanz Information MinEr).

Low-code tools play an important role in making data analysis and visualization accessible to researchers and students with limited experience, or interest, in programming (see De Mauro, Marzoni & Walter, 2021). While low-code tools do introduce closed-box issues, they can still be considered important steppingstones towards computational approaches (Tyrkkö & Ihrmark, submitted). An additional benefit is the shareability of the workflow resulting from designing the method pipeline in tools such as KNIME or Orange. 

The specific workflow resulting from Trolling the Library contains sentiment analysis and topic modeling components. While limited in scope, the discussion of the workflow highlights both the benefits and drawbacks of low-code workflows as potential shareable resources for the digital humanities. This contribution focuses on the ease of use, possible obstacles from an unfamiliar user’s perspective, and the availability of appropriate resources for the platform. 

Works cited:

Carlsson, H., Hanell, F., & Hansson, J. (2022). ”Det känns som att jag bara

sitter och väntar på att det ska explodera”: politisk påverkan på de

kommunala folkbibliotekens verksamhet i sex sydsvenska regioner. Nordic

Journal of Library and Information Studies, 3(1), 26-43.

De Mauro Andrea, Francesco Marzoni & Andrew J. Walter. 2021. Data Analytics Made Easy: Analyze and present data to make informed decisions without writing any code. Packt Publishing

Harding, T. (2021). Culture wars? The (re) politicization of Swedish cultural

policy. Cultural Trends, 1-18.

Tyrkkö, J., & Ihrmark, D. Submitted. Low-code data science tools for linguistics: Swiss army knives or pretty black boxes? In Coats S. and V. Laippala (eds.) March of Data (Language, Data Science and Digital Humanities X). London: Bloomsbury Academic.