News from the AUTHLIB Consortium
June 2025
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Over the spring months, our AUTHLIB (Neo-Authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response) consortium was busy gathering and analysing new data on illiberalism and moving ahead with the dissemination of our incoming results. Our research teams across Europe have prepared for the launch of a new survey, worked on the finishing touches of conference papers, and convened workshops and public debates about contemporary challenges to liberal democracy and the limits of normative intervention in its defence.
For a snapshot of our collective progress from April to June 2025, visit our quarterly update on our website and browse the highlights below.
Recent Events
All our public events are recorded and the videos are available on AUTHLIB’s YouTube channel.
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Leftist Illiberalisms: European and Latin American Perspectives
AUTHLIB Panel Discussion
Illiberalism is often associated with the radical right-wing of the political spectrum. While this may hold true in certain regions and historical contexts, such an association is conceptually limiting and misleading from a global perspective. This roundtable explored contemporary expressions of left-wing illiberalism, with a particular focus on Latin American politics and progressive projects in Europe. Participants also engaged with broader questions, such as whether a tension exists between social justice and individual liberty, and whether the post–Cold War left has succeeded in formulating an agenda that is both effective and democratic.
Watch the discussion
Mushrooming Anti-NGO Legislation in EU Member States and Its Implications
AUTHLIB Panel Discussion
Europe has witnessed over the past year concerted attacks on independent civil society at the EU and member-state levels by the populist radical right and segments of the center right. A particularly worrying aspect of this campaign is the mushrooming of “Russian-style” anti-NGO legislation in EU member states.
This discussion explored how these illiberal laws impact the operational environment for civil society in Hungary and Slovakia, and what challenges such legislation poses to democracy in both countries, to the EU legal order, and to the authority of the European Commission. The conversation also contributed to identifying potential mitigation strategies at the levels of affected CSOs and of EU policymaking. It also highlighted potential avenues for international donors to uphold their support for civic watchdogs, which are key guardians of democratic values in Hungary and Slovakia.
Watch the discussion
From Christian Democracy to Christian Autocracy
AUTHLIB Public Lecture
The public lecture of Professor Jan-Werner Müller (Princeton University) revisited three distinct strategies through which political thinkers tried to reconcile religion, in particular Catholicism, and modern democracy. It covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it also suggests that the twenty-first century has seen the emergence of two strands of thought that might resemble elements of those older strategies: Christian identitarian populism and soft versions of integralism.
The talk offers a number of reasons as to why these new strands of thought in fact betray the proper traditions of Christian Democracy.
Watch the lecture
Defending Liberalism – Normative Boundaries of Safeguarding Democracy
AUTHLIB Workshop
How do we protect democracy from those who seek to dismantle it? What happens when liberal tolerance is exploited by its enemies? Can illiberal forces be countered without compromising liberal values?
AUTHLIB’s two-day workshop “Defending Liberalism – Normative Boundaries of Safeguarding Democracy”, organized on March 31 – April 1 at the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest explored these and many other questions. The event brought together scholars of political theory to examine the shifting normative landscape of European democracy and the growing divergence from the liberal democratic model.
Visit our website and YouTube channel to watch the presentations.
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Publications
Victims, heroes, perpetrators: Italians’ perceptions of WWII history
In 2023 Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni made headlines with a contentious statement commemorating the Ardeatine massacre, when she stated that the 335 people shot to death as a reprisal for an attack on Nazi’s soldiers were “slaughtered simply because they were Italian.” (AP Press, 2023) This erasure of Italy’s antifascist movement is an example of one of the many narratives surrounding the country’s difficult past. Italy’s involvement in WWII is contentious and complex and so are the stories created around it, which have been instrumentalized for various political purposes over time. A recent study by Marta Vukovic, Susanna Bastaroli and Sylvia Kritzinger (2025) investigates Italians’ perception of Italy’s Fascist past and role in WWII on an individual level. Read the summary on the AUTHLIB Blog.
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Polarization and Democracy in Central Europe
AUTHLIB researchers Petra Guasti and Aleš Michal (Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic) published an article titled “Polarization and Democracy in Central Europe” in Politics and Governance. The article is free to download.
ABSTRACT
This article examines the dual role of polarization in fostering political mobilization for and against democracy in Central and Eastern Europe. Populist movements in this region often drive democratic decline, yet, notable cases, such as electoral victories in Czechia (2021) and Poland (2023), suggest that civil society can counter these trends. Following Schedler (2023), we perceive polarization as a fundamental democratic conflict about democratic norms and values. This study investigated how varying forms of polarization— ideological, affective, intransigent, and partisan sorting—affected the mobilization dynamics for and against democracy. We highlight that polarization affected mobilization for democracy more strongly than mobilization for autocracy—i.e., civil society successfully mobilized against populism. In a critical case study of limited polarized pluralism in the 2023 Czechia presidential election between populist and anti‐populist candidates, affective and partisan sorting polarization were the strongest predictors of populist support, with anger at the political situation boosting votes for the populist candidate. At the same time, pro‐Ukrainian stances drove support for the anti‐populist candidate. Our findings revealed that affective polarization and partisan sorting significantly shaped mobilization outcomes, thereby impacting democratic resilience and decay. By distinguishing between types of polarization, this study enhances the understanding of their distinct roles in political mobilization, thus underscoring that while polarization can threaten democracy, certain forms can also strengthen civic mobilization against populist movements.
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“Strongmen” Don’t Redistribute: Illiberal Leaders on the Right and Worsening Economic Inequality
AUTHLIB researchers Dean Schafer (CEU Democracy Institute, Hungary / Department of Political Science and Public Administration, Mississippi State University, USA), Seraphine F. Maerz (School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia), Carsten Q. Schneider (Department of Political Science, Central European University, Austria), together with Alexandra Krasnokutskaya (Central European University (CEU)) published an article titled ““Strongmen” Don’t Redistribute: Illiberal Leaders on the Right and Worsening Economic Inequality” in Politics and Governance. The article is free to download.
ABSTRACT
Illiberal leaders—sometimes called strongmen—often campaign on being more effective. The tradeoff presented to citizens is straightforward: they promise to cut through the indecisiveness and gridlock of democratic debate and give people what they want. Such leaders often use the rhetoric of economic grievances, corruption, and redistribution, but do they follow through on those promises? We answer this question using data from 38,557 speeches by 381 leaders in 120 countries between 1998 and 2024, combined with economic indicators from the World Bank and V-Dem measures on regime type and resource inequality. Utilizing a machine learning approach, we employ BERT language models that place leaders’ speeches on two continuous dimensions measuring liberal–illiberal speech and left–right economic positions. We test whether illiberals are more effective at translating their economic preferences into material changes. We show that illiberal leaders do deliver the goods—but only when they are on the economic right and only in the direction of greater economic inequality. Illiberals resemble populists because they engage in the rhetoric of cultural exclusion, but they do not push a distributional policy that benefits most citizens. The policy preferences of illiberal leftists, on the other hand, have no apparent effect. This article makes methodological contributions by building a one-dimensional scale for measuring the economic left–right positions of political leaders. This article also contributes to our understanding of the pernicious effects of illiberal leaders in deepening economic inequality.
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When Illiberals Govern: Educational and Cultural Policies in Hungary and Poland
AUTHLIB researchers Péter Radó (CEU Democracy Institute, Eötvös Loránd University) and Bálint Mikola (CEU Democracy Institute) published an article titled “When Illiberals Govern: Educational and Cultural Policies in Hungary and Poland” in Politics and Governance. The article is free to download.
ABSTRACT
Illiberal governments have been widely associated with democratic backsliding, the erosion of the rule of law, and executive aggrandisement. However, their impact on the various domains of knowledge production has not received enough scholarly attention. Through what policies do illiberal actors ensure the reproduction of their narratives? Do illiberal political leaders see education and culture as ideological vehicles, or do they consider them as arenas for power distribution? The article addresses these questions through the educational and cultural policy changes in two crucial cases of illiberals in power: post-2010 Hungary and 2015–2023 Poland. The article distinguishes between overt and hidden policy agendas, i.e., initiatives and aspirations that are driven by values and social or economic goals vs. policies serving purposes that cannot be openly represented. Through the analysis of legislative changes, party programs, and party discourse, complemented with semi-structured expert interviews, the study finds that despite sharing similar policy agendas, Fidesz and PiS considerably differ in the extent to which they transformed educational and cultural policies during their reign. While the main feature of educational and cultural policies in Hungary has been radical political power concentration, these policies in Poland rather served the ideological goals of the illiberal culture war. The article concludes that these differences were caused by the latitude afforded to these parties by their respective legislative majorities, indicating that whether illiberals have a supermajority in parliament influences the extent to which they can abuse their power.
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Cultural policies of populist governments in Central and Eastern Europe
AUTHLIB researchers Bálint Mikola (Central European University), Piotr Zagórski (SWPS University), Dean Schafer (Mississippi State University), Tomas Cirhan (Charles University), Jonas Suchanek (Czech Academy of Sciences), and Dominik Kevicky (Masaryk University) published an article titled “Cultural policies of populist governments in central and Eastern Europe: a comparative review” in the International Journal of Cultural Policy. The article is free to download.
ABSTRACT
The recent rise of populist and illiberal actors in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the concomitant democratic backsliding has generated notable scholarly interest; however, the implications of populism for cultural policy remain understudied. Since culture defines popular tastes and shapes interpretations of national identity and history, we adopt a comparative perspective to evaluate what impact these actors had on cultural policies between 2010 and 2023, using a combination of qualitative analysis of discursive and legislative changes, and quantitative text analysis. The findings indicate that the instrumentalization of cultural policies has been a function of ideology: while the ‘thick ideological’, radical right populist governing parties of Hungary and Poland abused culture as a vehicle for transmitting their nationalist narratives, their ‘thin populist’, technocratic Czech and Slovak counterparts took a more pragmatic approach to cultural policy. These findings highlight the impact of populist ideology with thick, cultural features on cultural policy.
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How Illiberal Parties Shape Immigration Discourse and Party Competition
Franziska Wagner (Central European University, Austria), Dean Schafer (Mississippi State University, USA / CEU Democracy Institute, Hungary), and Mehmet Yavuz (Central European University, Austria / University of Salzburg, Austria) published an article titled “Opposition to Government and Back: How Illiberal Parties Shape Immigration Discourse and Party Competition” in Politics and Governance. The article is free to download.
ABSTRACT
In recent decades, illiberal far-right parties have seen electoral success, reshaped European politics, challenged established norms, and accelerated shifts in political discourse. Thought to be isolated by a cordon sanitaire, these parties are increasingly normalized, gaining footholds in parliament and government—from coalition participation in Austria to majority rule in Hungary. As illiberal far-right parties gain access to power, a pressing question arises: How does their parliamentary and governmental participation influence both their discourse and that of mainstream parties? While we know that far-right parliamentary entry influences mainstream parties’ policy adaptations and strategic positioning, less is known about their systematic effects across countries or how governing responsibilities affect their discourse. Theories of issue competition suggest that parties adjust their stances to maintain voter support, but case studies have suggested diverging results. Leveraging a novel liberal–illiberal scale based on word embeddings and dictionaries, this study examines how far-right parties’ participation in parliaments and governments affects their own immigration discourse and that of mainstream parties by analyzing the interaction between 67 parties in eight European countries (Austria, Czechia, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland) over the last 15 years. Our findings show that mainstream parties, especially conservative ones, follow the shifts in the immigration discourse of far-right parties. Furthermore, we find that far-right parties minimally moderate their anti-immigration discourse when entering government and then radicalize again when they leave. The illiberal far-right therefore appears to have the net effect of pulling their country’s party system to the right on immigration. These findings clarify the consequences of illiberal party normalization for party competition, coalition strategies, and democratic stability in European politics.
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The project “AUTHLIB – Neo-Authoritarianisms in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response” is funded by the European Union and the UK Research and Innovation. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or UK Research and Innovation. Neither the European Union nor the UK Research and Innovation can be held responsible for them.
