Democracy is often said to be under the sway of “technocracy”: expert rule. Scientific institutions, experts and model have a tremendous influence on democratic decision-making, often at the cost of transparency and sovereignty. This research studies the rise of technocratic ways of thinking and the impact they have on democratic debate. It does so by mining and modelling millions of parliamentary debates from the twentieth century Dutch Lower House using NLP (Natural Language Processing) methods. Using language modelling, network analysis and argument mining, the research aims to uncover how expertise has become so important in politics.