Varieties of Illiberalism: An Overview of Policy and Ideological Differences Among Illiberal Parties in Europe
Lauritz Autischer – Beatrice Bottura – Bálint Mikola
This paper explores the relationship between the ideological stance of illiberal parties in Europe and their policy positions on a range of policy areas including economic policy, immigration policy, education and cultural policy, social policy, foreign policy, and gender. To achieve this goal, it relies on expert survey evaluations from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES 2024) and the Populism and Political Parties (POPPA 2023) expert survey. The paper uses Enyedi’s (2024) conceptualization of illiberalism that understands it as a political ideology based on power concentration, a partisan state, and closed society. We operationalize each of these dimensions using proxy variables from the expert surveys and explore their relationship with policy positions in search of clusters of illiberal parties that embody different varieties of illiberalism. Relying on a sample of 41 illiberal parties in Europe, we identify four varieties of illiberal parties that show a large degree of coherence across the policy areas we examine: religious xenophobes, authoritarian traditionalists, national conservatives, and leftist illiberals. Beyond establishing an initial typology of illiberal parties based on their policy profiles, the paper also makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating the applicability of expert survey data to gauge parties’ policy positions across various dimensions.
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Suggested citation: Autischer, Lauritz, Beatrice Bottura and Bálint Mikola. 2025. “Varieties of Illiberalism: An Overview of Policy and Ideological Differences Among Illiberal Parties in Europe.” AUTHLIB Working Papers 6.
