Dean Gibson Schafer – Bálint Mikola
October 10, 2025
Liberalism faces a variety of ideological challenges. Actors such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Giorgia Meloni in Italy have transformed Europe’s political landscape by presenting illiberal alternatives. Understanding these alternatives requires a map multiple, overlapping ideological dimensions, from religious or conservative values to nationalism, populism, and anti-pluralism.
The AUTHLIB Interactive Dashboard provides such a multidimensional map. It combines datasets produced by multiple members of the AUTHLIB consortium, allowing researchers, journalists, and citizens to explore how authoritarianism, populism, and illiberalism manifest across seven European countries: Austria, Czechia, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom. The data are presented in an approachable visual format, while the interactive nature of the platform allows users to generate and export their own figures, which can be saved as image files.
A Multidimensional Approach to Measuring Illiberalism
A strength of the AUTHLIB dataset is its methodological diversity. It combines multiple data sources and measurement approaches to create a map of illiberal attitudes across Europe at multiple levels. The dataset integrates survey data from over 7,000 citizens, computational analysis of parliamentary speeches and social media posts from official party accounts, and machine-learning analysis of executive speeches spanning nearly 25 years. These measures, which are described in the AUTHLIB Codebook, can also be compared with expert assessments from the most recent Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) (Rovny et al. 2025).
This approach allows us to examine illiberal attitudes at three levels: citizens, political parties, and country leaders. For example, the dashboard allows comparison of metrics based on what voters think about immigration and how party elites discuss immigration in parliament or Twitter. It is possible to track popular support for authoritarian values and whether political leaders demonstrate anti-democratic values in their public communications.
Beyond Left-Right Politics
An important feature of the AUTHLIB Interactive Dashboard is the ability to explore illiberal attitudes beyond traditional left-right divides. For example, our Comprehensive Illiberalism Index (illib9) combines citizen’s attitudes on nine different issues, including media freedom, minority rights, judicial independence, and the role of government in enforcing socio-cultural norms. Exploring this measure on the dashboard reveals surprising variation that does not fit neatly with parties’ economic ideology, such as the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM) voters being the most illiberal in Czechia.
The AUTHLIB dataset offers several measures for populism. For example, the Majoritarian Populism Index (populevil6) captures citizens’ anti-elite sentiment, support for majoritarian politics, and the belief that “politics is ultimately a struggle between good and evil”. Using the dashboard, we can compare these attitudes with the abovementioned illiberalism index. Surprisingly, they do not correlate significantly.
Figure 1. Comprehensive Illiberalism Index compared with Majoritarian Populism Index.
Comparing Elite Discourse with Citizens’ Attitudes
The AUTHLIB project advances computational methods to measure elite discourse. We analyzed parliamentary speeches from 2005 to 2022 to measure how parties discuss salient topics such as gender equality and immigration. For example, our Gender Discrimination measure uses word embeddings combined with dictionaries to capture whether parties use inclusive or discriminatory language when discussing LGBTQ+ issues in national parliaments.
The dashboard’s scatterplot feature allows users to compare the positions of party elites with those of their voters. By plotting parties’ Anti-Immigration positions (measured using parliamentary speeches) against voters’ Xenophobia (xenoph9), (measured through AUTHLIB’s public opinion survey) we can see which parties match their voters on opposition to immigration and which do not. Similar comparisons of parties could also be done across different dimensions: examining whether parties express both anti-immigrant rhetoric and opposition to gender equality.
Such comparisons can reveal interesting patterns. Opposition parties in Hungary appear to be more liberal than their voters on immigration. The most anti-immigrant parties, both in terms of their voters and party elites, are the Conservatives in the United Kingdom, Freedom and Direct Democracy (SPD) in Czechia, Fidesz in Hungary, Lega in Italy, Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland, Les Républicains (LR) and the National Rally (RN) in France, and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ). On this specific dimension, the UK Conservatives have more in common with far-right parties. These are a few of the observations that the AUTHLIB Interactive Dashboard makes possible.
Figure 2. Parties’ Anti-Immigration Rhetoric vs. Xenophobia Among Party Voters
A Resource for Understanding Democratic Challenges
The AUTHLIB Interactive Dashboard provides access for anyone interested in exploring the multidimensional ideological map of European parties. The data can be useful not just for academic researchers and policy analysts but also for journalists tracking political developments, civil society organizations monitoring democratic health, and citizens who want to understand their country’s political landscape. The easy-to-use interface allows users to explore relationships between variables, compare countries and parties, and discover patterns that might otherwise remain hidden even from the researchers who produced the data.
As liberal democratic institutions face pressure across Europe, it is crucial to understand the nature and extent of emerging illiberal attitudes. The AUTHLIB dataset and dashboard provide the empirical foundation for this understanding, and it will continue to be updated with new measures and more extensive coverage. We welcome visitors to explore this map of the ideological terrain on which European democracy will be contested.
Explore the data at https://authlib.shinyapps.io/authlib-interactive/
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Authors:
Dean Gibson Schafer is an assistant professor at Mississippi State University. Before that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Central European University’s Democracy Institute.
Bálint Mikola is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Central European University’s Democracy Institute.
The AUTHLIB consortium does not take collective positions. Publications only represent the views of their individual authors.
