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Lookup NU author(s): Professor Ben FarrandORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Digital sovereignty has emerged as a central organizing principle in European Union governance, yet systematic understanding of its conceptual evolution remains limited. This article provides the first macro-level analysis of how digital sovereignty evolves across institutional and academic domains. Through analysis of 156 academic articles and 808 EU policy documents using Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modeling, we reveal sophisticated patterns in institutional conceptualization and evolution of digital sovereignty. Our findings demonstrate that its development reflects complex adaptive processes rather than linear policy progression. We identify a significant shift in institutional discourse from 2013-2016, where digital sovereignty transitions from a narrow technical concept to a comprehensive policy framework. This conceptual flexibility enhances rather than inhibits digital sovereignty development. The study advances understanding of how institutions construct and deploy new governance concepts in response to technological change while revealing previously obscured patterns in institutional interconnection.
Author(s): Turobov A, Carrapico H, Farrand B
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Governance
Year: 2026
Volume: 39
Issue: 2
Print publication date: 01/04/2026
Online publication date: 20/01/2026
Acceptance date: 13/01/2026
Date deposited: 13/01/2026
ISSN (print): 0952-1895
ISSN (electronic): 1468-0491
Publisher: Wiley
URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/gove.70112
DOI: 10.1111/gove.70112
Data Access Statement: The data that support the findings of this study are openly available inUK Data Service ReShare at https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/856533/, reference number 10.5255/UKDA-SN-856533.All datasets and the codebook with supportive documentations areavailable via stable link at the ReShare UK Data Service repository:Turobov, Aleksei and Farrand, Benjamin and Farrand Carrapico, Hel-ena (2024). Digital Sovereignty by Design, Academic Articles and PolicyPapers, 2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service.https://dx.doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-856533.
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