Definitions severed from empirical analysis become arbitrary instruments of whoever holds definitional power.

Evidence

If the concept is not intimately related to the empirical analysis of a phe­ nomenon then there is nothing to which one can anchor the concept, and everything becomes a matter of who is in charge of the defini­ tion. For example, communist countries were often called people’s “democratic” republics; this usage was an abuse of political and se­ mantic power. If we were to change our definition of democracy to accommodate these countries then our hypotheses about democracy would have to change as well. Likewise, we cannot divorce our con­ cept of corporatism from how corporatism fits into theories, as either an independent or dependent variable. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 30

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how authoritarian regimes capture vocabulary — ‘people’s democratic republic’ as a case study in definitional power and its downstream effects on comparative politics research.
• XREF: Connects to the Orwell material on political language and to colonial-era reframings of imperial vocabulary.