Over the past quarter, the AUTHLIB consortium made further strides in mapping and analyzing illiberalism across Europe. The Sciences Po team developed further a new and innovative text-classification model combining human and AI coding to refine its study of illiberal speech acts, while the Oxford team made progress in the research on emotional and rhetorical appeals through text analysis and experiments. The CEU team focused on understanding the historical embeddings of illiberalism and the development of a visualization tool to map findings. Meanwhile, the Scuola Normale Superiore team conducted in-depth interviews with key illiberal actors in order to shed light on their transnational cooperation. AUTHLIB also organized academic and policy discussions: it launched its new AUTHLIB Seminars series and hosted a panel on foreign information manipulation. On March 31 and April 1, the consortium gathers with political philosophers at a two-day workshop in Budapest to discuss the normative limits of safeguarding democracy.
During the past months, the Sciences Po team leading the work package exploring the ideological configurations of illiberalism in Europe primarily focused on developing a new model to analyze the textual data collected by the team over the past year. This new model uses a combination of coding by humans and by diverse large language models in order to arrive at improved text classifications of illiberal speech acts. The team is now preparing to run the new model on the full dataset it built during the project. Simultaneously, the last four months saw the collection, preparation, and publication of the 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey on party positioning.
Continuing its work, the Oxford team leading our “Rhetorical and emotional appeals” work package has been pushing on with its text analysis and online experiments on emotions to identify the emotional drivers of illiberalism. Additionally, it focused on the analysis of the results from a set of laboratory experiments that engaged participants in a study designed to estimate the impact of populist rhetoric on their propensity to support redistribution and to break with democratic norms. In initial rounds, participants’ voting for preferred tax rates tended to match how well they were rewarded for their “work” in the experiments. However, when populist rhetoric about advantages to groups—in which they also “worked”—was introduced, this produced a marked effect, not only on the willingness of groups to support or oppose redistribution even against their own interests, but more disturbingly also on their willingness to engage in anti-democratic practices. Moreover, there were strong indications from qualitative evidence that strong emotional responses were also triggered by such rhetoric. The Oxford team is now in the process of refining its analysis, particularly of the qualitative data, and writing up the results. Stay tuned for our reports!
The CEU team has been busy leading multiple work packages toward completion. It worked on finalizing the results of the work package on the historical embeddings of illiberalism in Europe, the initial findings of which were presented in November last year at our Illiberal Legacies and Ideological Morphologies workshop. The lectures at this event are available HERE and the corresponding report will be published soon.
In parallel, the CEU team led the work on pulling together findings from various work packages to build and to validate a multidimensional map of illiberalism as well as to develop a visualization tool, using the Shiny app, that makes data collected in the project easily accessible and digestible. The tool is undergoing a final review before it goes online in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, the Scuola Normale Superiore team is exploring the international cooperation of illiberal forces engaged in various activities. The most important was the finalization of qualitative data collection through in-depth interviews with more than 35 pivotal figures from illiberal actors in seven countries, including political parties, social movements, and nongovernmental organizations. The team anticipates that the findings will yield significant insights into the emotional, cognitive, and relational mechanisms of the transnationalization of illiberalism in Europe. Moreover, the team has been working on several outputs ranging from the investigation of diffusion of the “anti-wokeness” master frame across European illiberal groups to a comprehensive report based on the event-chronology methodology to identify patterns of transnationalization of illiberal politics. The report, based on an innovative approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methods, will be published imminently. In addition to these research activities, team members are preparing for various upcoming academic events including the Democratic Backsliding and the Autocratic Appeal in Consolidated Democracies conference at European University Institute, the Transnationalization of the Far-Right workshop organized by SAIS Bologna, a COSMOS Share event at the Scuola Normale Superiore, and the General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research.
To gather feedback internally, two AUTHLIB Seminars took place over the past months to discuss draft papers on the initial findings of the project, which will later be turned into academic papers. At the first one, on January 13, Professor Zsolt Enyedi presented his paper, co-authored with Bálint Mikola and Dean Schafer, titled The Non-Economic Varieties of Illiberalism: A Study of European Parties through Expert Judgments and the Attitudes of Party Constituencies. The second AUTHLIB Seminar, on March 11, featured Professor Jan Rovny from Sciences Po, who presented his paper, co-authored with Elena Cossu and Luis Sattelmayer, titled Diversity and Democracy: Ethnic Minorities and the Support for Democracy in Europe. The AUTHLIB Seminar series will continue with new events during the spring.
Meanwhile, the Vienna University team is working on a paper on discourses around social group identities and the role of illiberal parties in shaping them, while the Sciences Po team is writing a publication describing the latest Chapel Hill Expert Survey data on party positions.
To disseminate AUTHLIB’s findings, the consortium organized a panel discussion titled Combating Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in the Digital Age: The Role of the EU on March 25, that presented and discussed the AUTHLIB working paper titled Brainwashing of the People, by the People, with the People: Mass Persuasion and Systemic Disinformation in Democratic and non-Democratic contexts by Péter Krekó (The German Marshall Fund of the United States and Political Capital).
The paper explores the evolution of mass persuasion and disinformation in democratic and autocratic contexts, challenging traditional paradigms of information control, and is available to download HERE.
A new academic publication also saw the light of day: Zsolt Enyedi and Bálint Mikola’s article titled Legislative Capture in Hungary: Well-managed Autocratization has been published in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and is available HERE.”
Finally, on March 31 and April 1, the AUTHLIB consortium brings together renowned political philosophers for a two-day workshop titled Defending Liberalism – Normative Boundaries of Safeguarding Democracy at the CEU Democracy Institute in Budapest on the normative boundaries of interventions aiming to safeguard the liberal order, with a public lecture by Professor Jan-Werner Müller titled From Christian Democracy to Christian Autocracy concluding the event. Registration to follow the lecture online on April 1 is still open!
