Redefining a concept to fit a case alters the hypotheses built on it.

Evidence

If the concept is not intimately related to the empirical analysis of a phenomenon then there is nothing to which one can anchor the concept, and everything becomes a matter of who is in charge of the definition. For example, communist countries were often called people’s “democratic” republics; this usage was an abuse of political and semantic 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. — Gary Goertz, Social Science Concepts, 74

Categorization

• SHARE: A tidy, quotable demonstration that concept-stretching silently rewrites your causal claims — ideal for the one political-science friend who argues about ‘democratic republics.’
• DEFINE: Explains why anchoring concepts in empirical analysis is what prevents meaning from becoming a pure power struggle.