Survey studies show that popular support for democracy is strong in democratic and non-democratic countries. Naturally, the question is if democracy actually means the same thing in different linguistic, cultural, and political contexts. Mass media is often mentioned as decisive in forming citizens' understandings of democracy, but the media discourse is rarely in focus in comparative studies on popular conceptions of democracy. This article contributes to the debate by analysing data collected from online media in 93 countries. By utilizing tools from natural language processing, we provide new insights based on methods that are both extensive, flexible and cost-efficient. Our analysis shows that the media discourse revolves around democracy as governance, as outcomes and as values, but that these abstract understandings have additional dimensions. Our main contributions are three: (i) we show that the media discourse is related to popular understandings of democracy; (ii) our results indicate that there are common denominators of how the D-word is discussed in media across the globe, but when analysing the dimensions in more detail, common denominators are few and (iii) by relating democracy to everyday politics, media seems to legitimize any regime as democratic rather than being a beacon for liberal democracy.

The right to self-constitute and to demarcate the demos, i.e. the right to regulate membership, is an important part of Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination. The right to self-constitute may create different kinds of conflicts with the states in which Indigenous Peoples live but may also affect the balance of power within Indigenous communities. The transnational Indigenous Sámi people have no common constitution defining who belong to the people. In Finland, Norway and Sweden, Sámi membership has been handled in relation to specific legislation on Sámi issues. In this chapter, the authors’ aim is twofold: First, to describe the criteria for registering in the Sámi electoral roll in the Nordic states and second, to analyze why these criteria have been perceived in such a different fashion within the Sámi communities in their respective countries and why they have been implemented differently by the three Sámediggis. Since Indigenous self-determination within the borders of already-existing nation-states always means some external control and not total autonomy, it is important to compare how the question of membership is playing itself out among the same Indigenous People but in different national contexts that otherwise have so much in common.

On an international level, we have the last decades witnessed a remarkable development of Indigenous rights, mainly as a result of Indigenous peoples’ political struggle and mobilisation on a local, national and international level. Paramount in this context is the third article of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) recognising Indigenous peoples as peoples with a right to self-determination. The Nordic countries had a common response to rights-claims from their Indigenous people, the Sámi, in establishing representative institutions – Sámediggis (Sámi Parliaments in Northern Sámi) – consisting of popularly elected Sámi representatives. Today, the Sámediggis are considered the main vehicles to safeguard Sámi self-determination. What the right to self- determination implies in political practice – that is, for domestic constitutional, legal and institutional reforms – is, however, still most controversial. How Sámi self-determination ought to be implemented in the Nordic countries has also been recurrently debated, especially the role of the Sámediggis. There are, however, few systematic studies analysing how persons belonging to Indigenous peoples perceive the right to self-determination: On what matters are self-determination of importance to Indigenous persons? Are there differences between persons identifying with the same Indigenous group? And how are Indigenous persons’ understanding of self-determination related to international law and contemporary national policies? The aim of this chapter is to analyse Sámi self-determination from the perspective of the Sámi electorate in Sweden based on data from the second Swedish Sámi Election Study in 2017.

The doctrine of popular sovereignty holds that the 'supreme authority of the state' belongs to the people, not to the political institutions exercising public power. What are the implications of this view when there is more than one people in the territory of that state? The case of Indigenous peoples highlights this question, as they are unequivocally peoples who are distinct from the majority population. This paper subjects to criticism of the received view according to which the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in democratic institutions is sufficient for the realization of their popular sovereignty. Instead, we argue that their constituent power must be recognized - the power to create and negotiate the constitutional order. The realization of popular sovereignty in settler states thus necessitates a process where the constitutional order is negotiated by Indigenous peoples and the majority population in conditions where the two parties are mutually recognized as sovereign.