Over the spring months, our AUTHLIB 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, read our highlights below.
The Sciences Po team, which leads our work on the ideological configurations of illiberalism, devoted the quarter to advancing its publications. Elena Cossu and Caterina Froio completed a study of how terrorist attacks reshape French parties’ multicultural agendas, while Jan Rovny, Cossu, and Luis Sattelmayer drafted a paper on the democratic preferences of Europe’s ethnic minorities. A third manuscript—produced with colleagues in Vienna and Warsaw—investigates the democratic trade-offs citizens are ready to make for specific policy outcomes, drawing on a conjoint experiment from the AUTHLIB survey carried out by the Warsaw team. Alongside these writing efforts, the team audited its human-coded text corpus and refined large-language-model prompts to improve the validity of its measures.
At the University of Vienna, preparations for a new survey entered their final stage. The questionnaire—complete with two embedded experiments—has cleared partner reviews; a survey agency has been contracted, and fieldwork in the United States and Austria is scheduled to begin in the summer. In tandem, Vienna researchers advanced a text-analytic project that contrasts how liberal and illiberal parties construct social out-groups, tracing both cross-party differences and temporal dynamics in rhetoric.
At the University of Oxford, work continued on three main fronts. First, the team presented a paper to the European Political Science Association, that reports on the results of the text analysis AUTHLIB researchers undertook on emotions and illiberalism among parties in our seven countries. Second, writing up the analysis of a lab experiment showing the effects of emotional political rhetoric on the propensity of participants to infringe democratic norms by seeking to suppress the rights of other participants to vote is also underway. And third, the team is in the field with a survey experiment that will further test the power of emotional rhetoric to push respondents both toward and hopefully away from illiberal stances.
Meanwhile, the Scuola Normale Superiore team shifted from data collection to publication. Manuscripts on the diffusion of “anti-wokeness” frames and on evolving transnational mobilization tactics are now under journal review. The group also presented its findings at three major gatherings this quarter—SAIS Bologna’s workshop on far-right transnationalization, the EUI conference on democratic backsliding, and CEU’s “Contested Solidarities”—and is lining up panels for the ECPR General Conference and the conferences of the Italian Political Science Association and the Italian Sociological Association later this year.
Dissemination was likewise front and centre at Central European University. On 19 May, CEU Vienna and Georgetown University co-hosted the conference Democracy, Illiberal Alternatives, and Culture Wars, featuring AUTHLIB presentations by Zsolt Enyedi, Erin K. Jenne, and Carsten Q. Schneider.
A month later, CEU and the Transatlantic Foundation / The German Marshall Fund of the United States organized the online panel Leftist Illiberalisms: European and Latin American Perspectives.
Addressing ongoing policy developments undermining liberal-democratic values in Europe, the team at the Transatlantic Foundation also organized a panel discussion on the mushrooming of anti-NGO legislation in Europe, with a focus on recent developments in Hungary and Slovakia.
In print, AUTHLIB’s thematic issue “Illiberal Politics in Europe” at Politics and Governance neared completion: four AUTHLIB articles—on immigration discourse, education and culture policy, inequality under strong-man rule, and polarization in Central Europe—are already available, with the remaining contributions set to appear over the summer.
Finally, the Charles University team in Prague concentrated on the organisation of two upcoming fora under its mini-public designs. The Forum of Ideological Opponents, scheduled for July in Liberec, moved from concept to detailed design: fifty citizens with contrasting views on migration and traffic calming will deliberate over two moderated sessions, supported by balanced background materials and pre-/post-surveys developed with CVVM. The design and methodology were refined through consultations with AUTHLIB project partners, the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the City of Liberec. Planning also began for the Practitioners of Democracy Forum in Prague in September, which will gather local public officials, civil-society actors, and community leaders to reflect on institutional and informal practices that support democratic resilience at the local level.
With survey fieldwork imminent, papers rolling out, and two public fora on the horizon, the coming quarter promises to bring both new data and fresh public engagement. As always, you can follow our events, publications, and open-access resources at our website—and we look forward to sharing the next round of results in September.
To make sure you don’t miss our upcoming events and publications, follow us on Bluesky, X, Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube.
