As 2025 draws to a close, the AUTHLIB project closes an eventful quarter as it enters its final stretch early next year. Our quarterly update highlights key developments from across the consortium, including preparations for the project’s concluding conference in January 2026, recent practitioner and youth forums, public events and webinars, new and forthcoming academic publications, ongoing survey analyses, data-sharing efforts, and the upcoming release of country reports synthesizing insights on illiberalism across Europe.
Final Conference
Mapping the Illiberal Challenge: Patterns, Drivers, and Consequences
Thursday-Friday, January 8-9, 2026
Central European University (1051 Budapest, Nádor str. 15.)
As Europe confronts the rise of illiberalism across the continent and graples with its political and societal consequences, the Horizon-funded Neo-authoritarianism in European and the Liberal Democratic Response (AUTHLIB) project brings together leading scholars to unpack what drives this shift and how democracies can respond.
Over two days, speakers will explore—among many other themes—the historical roots of illiberalism, the appeal of illiberal narratives and voters’ receptiveness today, the strategies of far-right actors, the social and economic anxieties they tap into, and the evolving challenges to constitutionalism, pluralism, and the rule of law. Drawing on cutting-edge research—from large-scale surveys and social-media analyses to deliberative forums—the conference will present the project’s final academic insights exploring the challenges liberal democracies face in the 21st century.
Highlights from the past months
Over the past months, the AUTHLIB consortium, under the coordination of the Central European University team, has been busy preparing for the project’s concluding conference titled “Mapping the Illiberal Challenge: Patterns, Drivers, and Consequences.” The event, to be held at CEU Budapest on January 8–9, 2026, will present the core findings of the project with the participation of speakers from all partner institutions, as well as distinguished external speakers including Michael Ignatieff (CEU), Marlene Wind (University of Copenhagen), Mieke Verloo (Radboud University), and Staffan I. Lindberg (University of Gothenburg). Registration for the conference is open until January 4 through the links above!
Meanwhile, on October 10–11, 2025, the Charles University team of AUTHLIB hosted the Practitioners of Democracy Forum in Prague. The two-day workshop brought together researchers and practitioners to discuss the findings and insights developed within the framework of the AUTHLIB project. It served as a forum for dialogue between academic experts and civic actors engaged in understanding and countering illiberal trends across Europe. Structured around five thematic panels, the discussions addressed key dimensions of the project’s research—from mapping illiberalism and examining voter attitudes to exploring the emotional dynamics of neo-authoritarian discourse and strategies for strengthening democratic resilience.
In the beginning of October, the team of the Transatlantic Foundation of the German Marshall Fund of the United States organized a webinar on the outcome of the Czech parliamentary election and how the return of ANO’s Andrej Babis may impact democratic developments in the country and the Czech Republic’s position in the European Union. Closing the month, the TF-GMF team hosted another online discussion on the impact of illiberalism on politics, parties, and polities to showcase the main findings presented in AUTHLIB’s Politics and Governance journal special issue “Illiberal Politics in Europe”. The recordings of all AUTHLIB public events are available on our YouTube channel!
The Prague team continued the project’s public engagement through the organization of the Liberec Youth Forum, titled “A Region for the Young,” which was held on November 29–30 at the Regional and Research Library in Liberec. It brought together 54 young people aged 14–26 from across the Liberec Region to discuss issues that matter most to them. Through facilitated workshops and peer deliberation, participants identified key concerns—transport, culture, leisure activities, education, and the teaching of politics in schools—and proposed solutions. These were presented and debated with local, regional, and national politicians. Organized by the Institute of Political Studies at Charles University in cooperation with several partners, the forum aimed not only to gather young people’s views but also to strengthen their sense of representation and confidence in public participation. The two-day event fostered a calm, consensus-oriented atmosphere and demonstrated the value of youth involvement in regional governance, complementing existing participatory initiatives in Liberec.
The Scuola Normale Superiore team published an article in the Nations and Nationalism journal on the diffusion of “anti-wokeness” as a far-right master frame from the United States to France and submitted manuscripts on the transnationalization of far-right politics to several prestigious academic journals and book publishers. The Sciences Po team’s work during this period has also centered on the preparation of publications. First, the team produced and published a research note on the 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey, offering an updated mapping of party positions and ideological dynamics across Europe. In addition to this expert-based work, the team has also been developing a set of analyses employing existing large-scale comparative survey data, particularly the European Social Survey and the European Values Study. These analyses form the basis for a paper examining democratic support among Muslim minorities in Western Europe, with a focus on the conditional nature of this support as a function of religiosity and cultural conservatism. Finally, the Sciences Po team completed and submitted a research paper based on the conjoint experiment embedded in the AUTHLIB survey, analyzing how citizens evaluate political actors who vary in their deviation from liberal-democratic principles. Stay tuned for the publication!
The team at the University of Vienna made significant progress in concluding survey work assessing democratic, illiberal, populist, and authoritarian attitudes among the public in Germany and the United States. After the collection of the data by the end of October, the team has been busy analyzing the results over the past months and is drafting a set of new publications to be released in the new year.
In parallel, as part of wrapping up data processing, the CEU team has been working on synchronizing all empirical data for submission to a public data repository, as well as on updating the AUTHLIB Interactive Dashboard, which is already available and presents key project findings in a visual format.
Building on the data collected throughout the project, all research teams have been actively working on country reports exploring illiberalism across the seven countries studied under the AUTHLIB project. Aimed at a broader, non-expert audience, these studies will provide a useful overview of the challenge illiberal forces pose to democracy across Europe, synthesizing empirical indicators and qualitative insights to situate national developments on both the demand and supply sides of the political spectrum. Stay tuned for the publication of the AUTHLIB Country Reports in early 2026!
