Democracy, a contested ideal, has seen its meaning expand and contract in response to historical events, institutional change, and scholarly priorities. Despite extensive theoretical work on democratic models, a significant challenge remains in systematically quantifying how abstract political concepts evolve semantically over time, as traditional approaches have relied primarily on qualitative case studies or theoretical frameworks without empirical measurement of linguistic patterns. Yet little is known about how the term itself has evolved within political science discourse in the recent decades. This research is particularly significant given the global phenomena of democratic erosion and the increasingly multidimensional nature of democratic theory that has developed in scholarly discourse over recent decades. This thesis applies a relational semantic framework, treating concepts as dynamic networks of associations, to over 6,000 articles published between 1971 and 2024 in the American Journal of Political Science (AJPS) and the British Journal of Political Science (BJPS). Using diachronic word-embedding models trained on bootstrapped sub-corpora, five semantic dimensions are constructed, electoral, liberal, participatory, deliberative, and egalitarian, based on anchor words drawn from the Varieties of Democracy framework and Democratic Erosion Event Dataset codebook. I then measure how closely “democracy” and a broader democracy–authoritariandimension align with each dimension over time and across journals. The findings reveal that while electoral principles remain foundational to democracy’s scholarly conceptualization, a significant expansion has been incorporating liberal, participatory, and egalitarian dimensions. Academic discourse mirrors real-world democratic decline through the weakening association with deliberation and increased usage of terms related to erosion and backsliding. Journal-specific differences highlight distinctive normative priorities in how democracy is framed against authoritarianism. These semantic shifts illuminate how scholarly understandings of democracy evolve in response to both intellectual developments and global political challenges, demonstrating the value of computational approaches to conceptual analysis in political theory.