While political issues are something we debate, choose and act upon, depoliticized issues are taken as given. They are, one could say, dormant parts of the structural foundation we operate within. Puzzled by a series of recent developments such as stagnating political participation, expanding networks of non-political organizations, growing numbers of delegated agencies and occurrence of techno-rational discourses, scholars have found an increased interest in the concept of depoliticization. Yet, even though the concept has been widely discussed, it still lacks a clear conceptualization and operationalization. This again causes difficulties for the accumulation and generalizability of the empirical literature. In this article, I propose a new way of understanding depoliticization. Using ISO standards as a starting point, I treat issues as units and estimate their degree of political orientation. The core measurements of political orientation include actor diversity, language sentiment and time framing. In this way, the article brings forth new insight into how we can quantitatively study depoliticization.