Illiberals in Power: Mapping Illiberal Subtypes in Seven Countries, 1990-2022

• In Event: Understanding Variation in Party Positions

Abstract

The illiberal ideology of parties in government exerts an independent causal effect on democratic erosion (Kellam and Benasaglio Berlucchi 2023). But, before getting into government, do illiberal parties signal their anti-democratic positions? Or, do illiberal parties become more expressly illiberal only when in power? Further, by comparing transitions of power between liberal and illiberal parties in seven European countries over 30 years (1990-2022), what varieties of illiberalism can we identify?

This project uses a combination of text-analysis methods to build a liberal-illiberal scale covering six policy areas: education and culture, the environment, foreign policy, gender, immigration and citizenship, and social policy. Our approach can distinguish between political actors within the same country and is sensitive to different subtypes of illiberalism—such as anti-pluralism, nativism, religious fundamentalism, or villainization of political opponents. It brings together three datasets of speeches in parliament—the Comparative Agendas Project, ParlSpeech, and ParlEE—covering seven European countries: Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Austria, France, Italy, and the UK. Given the party identity and policy topic of actors’ speeches in parliament, we calculate the terms that most define each party by topic. Then, developing methods validated by Maerz and Schneider (2020) and Jenne, Hawkins, and Silva (2021), we build a liberal-illiberal dictionary and use word embedding techniques to map parties’ position in these seven European countries on our liberal-illiberal scale. We argue that illiberals in power tend to converge on cultural issues but diverge on two dimensions: the role of the state (paternalistic vs minimalist), and the legitimacy of state institutions (support for technocratic efficiency vs accusations of corruption). Therefore, this article provides evidence of the varieties of illiberalism emerging in Europe.

Authors

• Dean Schafer, Mississippi State University

• Franziska Wagner, Central European University

• Mehmet Yavuz, Central European University