The AUTHLIB consortium had an active summer, participating in key conferences and progressing with its research on illiberalism in Europe. Members presented findings at the 30th International Conference of Europeanists in Lyon, addressing topics such as the transnational diffusion of illiberal politics and autocratic attitudes. AUTHLIB’s survey mapping illiberal attitudes in seven European countries was completed in August, with results being analyzed for upcoming publications. The Sciences Po team focused on coding political texts to analyze the ideological varieties of illiberalism. Members of the team analyzed social media data related to far-right and mainstream party responses to the 2015 terrorist attacks in France. The Oxford team analyzed 20 years of party tweets from AUTHLIB countries and developed sentiment analysis models to explore changes over time. They also conducted experiments to test the emotional impact of political rhetoric on public attitudes toward democracy. The SNS team mapped the transnational networks and interactions of illiberal actors and compiled a comprehensive data set for further study. The team at the Charles University prepared the ground for AUTHLIB’s Ideological Opponents Forum, Professionals of Democracy Forum, and Citizens Forum. As the project enters its final year, a multi-dimensional map synthesizing findings is being developed, while two new work packages are starting in the fall.
The summer months were not only for recovery across the AUTHLIB teams. Several members of the consortium attended the 30th International Conference of Europeanists in Lyon, France, organized by the Council of European Studies. They presented original research findings emanating from the AUTHLIB project in three panels covering “The Transnational Diffusion of Illiberal Politics”, “Illiberal Challenges in Central and Eastern Europe”, and “Autocratic Attitudes and Discourse”. Beyond presenting fresh research findings, the conference also provided a venue for the project’s regular Management Team meeting, since several of the Principal Investigators attended the event in person. Eyeing the last year of the AUTHLIB project, the Management Team deliberated about important milestones expected during the fall, including the publication of survey results that will map illiberal, authoritarian, and populist attitudes in seven European countries.
The survey study, overseen by Radosław Markowski at the SWPS University, was successfully completed in August, providing the team with survey data and results from a conjoint experiment. Complementing the inquiry, Sciences Po’s Jan Rovny has also been looking at various social determinants for the support of liberal democracy, based on existing European Social Survey 10 data.
Over the past few weeks, the SWPS University team has been testing and conducting preliminary analyses on the survey and conjoint experiment data. Work has also started to consolidate the results in a paper offering a typology on the distribution of illiberal orientations across EU member states and in another focusing on the survey experiments, analyzing factors that influence attitudes toward liberal democracy. These papers, which will also be available among AUTHLIB’s deliverables on the website, are the collaborative effort of researchers from various institutions involved in the project.
The typology that is being developed captures the distribution of different illiberal orientations and their correlates. This analysis will enhance our understanding of the patterns and relationships between these orientations and key socio-political factors. The results will contribute to ongoing discussions about the dynamics of illiberalism in contemporary society. The conjoint experiment was designed to disentangle support for specific cultural-political objectives from preferences for decision-making methods that may conflict with democratic procedures. This approach isolates the influence of individual factors and provides a clearer understanding of how different components shape preferences in politically charged contexts.
Meanwhile in Paris, the Sciences Po team spent the summer honing the hardcoding of political texts for specifying different types of illiberal speech. Research assistants have spent some weeks coding a set of training texts—speeches and tweets by party leaders and members of parliament from the seven focus countries of the project—which the team will use to classify its corpus of political speeches, manifestos, and tweets in the coming month. The initial results of this effort under the “Ideological configurations” work package will also be available in the fall.
Sciences Po team members Elena Cossu and Caterina Froio have been analyzing social media data to show how the 2015 Islamist terror attacks in Paris intensified political debates on multiculturalism in France. Focusing on the communication strategies of far-right and mainstream parties, they explore whether these parties’ rhetoric on multiculturalism converges or diverges in response to these critical incidents.
The Oxford team too had a busy summer. It continued its analysis of political parties’ tweets from all AUTHLIB countries (bar Hungary where parties do not tweet) over a nearly 20-year period. Utilizing a liberalism/illiberalism indicator it constructed from ten issue dimensions. The team then developed a large language model classifier and cross-checked it against expert survey data on parties’ stances. In line with the main focus of Oxford’s work package on rhetorical and emotional appeals, the team was then able to run the same tweets on various sentiment dictionaries to plot changes over time, across parties and party types, and across countries. Initial findings, which were presented at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association in Los Angeles, point to the importance of incumbency and electoral timing, as well as major contextual factors like the financial crisis and the migrant crisis, in determining emotions.
The Oxford team also made great strides with its lab experiment that aims to expose respondents to emotional frames that are expected to alter not only their willingness to support public goods via taxation, but also their propensity to engage in measures to suppress or support democratic institutions. Finally, the team, under the leadership of Stephen Whitefield, has designed a further experiment that will be conducted across all seven AUTHLIB countries as well as the United States. This will influence respondents by varying the emotional content of political appeals on issues such as economic inequality, immigration, minority rights, and the role of checks and balance, which, it is hoped, will show clearly whether liberals may be swayed by negative emotional rhetoric (rooted in anger and disgust) to become more illiberal, or whether illiberals might be swayed by positive emotional appeals (think Kamala Harris and joy) to become more liberal in their views. Initial results of these experiments will also be available in the coming months.
The SNS team published a comprehensive report outlining a theoretical and analytical framework for understanding the pathways and mechanisms of the transnationalization of illiberal actors, including political parties, social movements, and NGOs. It also compiled a data set for the purpose of researching the transnationalization and diffusion of the identities, networks, and practices of illiberal and radical-right collective actors, along with the role of new communication technologies in these processes. The data set, which comprises empirical material collected from diverse online sources through the application of various qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches, is designed to facilitate comprehensive and empirical understanding of these processes among researchers, policymakers, and the public. Over the next quarter, the SNS team will continue to analyze the data and eventually share its findings via scientific publications. Furthermore, the team plans to gather empirical data from in-depth interviews with illiberal actors to examine the emotional, cognitive, and relational dynamics and mechanisms of the cross-national diffusion of illiberalism across Europe.
While several members of the consortium are busy wrapping up work packages that produced new, exciting data on illiberalism across Europe, a team at the Central European University (CEU), led by Dean Schafer, in charge of building and validating a multi-dimensional map of AUTHLIB’s findings started synthesizing this data, including text data, survey data, and policy analysis. It will integrate the data in an interactive map that will help users visualize different varieties of illiberal parties, as well as to feed their own data into the project’s models.
Finally, the team at Charles University in Prague, led by Petra Guasti, will be rolling out three deliberative fora of different constellations in the coming months: the Ideological Opponents Forum (IOF), the Professionals of Democracy Forum (PDF) and the Citizens Forum of AUTHLIB. Preparations for these forums began during the summer: the team refined the methodology and developed the key tools for the IOF, including a pre-deliberation survey, a deliberation script and a post-deliberation survey. Having finalized the protocol for ethical approval, these are now ready for pre-testing with students. The results of the AUTHLIB survey conducted by SWPS University will be used to finalize the selection of issues that are divisive, salient and particularly relevant to young people for the pre-test and subsequent IOF. The Charles University team also organized a medium-sized event at the Czech Senate in September, bringing together researchers, politicians and civil society to test how scientific findings can be used to stimulate practical discussions in the forthcoming AUTHLIB PDF. For the Citizens’ Forum, the team reviewed previous Citizens’ Forums held in the Czech Republic and is now working with consortium partners to assess whether to hold the event face-to-face or online, while ensuring inclusivity and maintaining high deliberative quality. Finally, to lay the groundwork for the AUTHLIB e-learning platform, consultations are underway with experts in civic education to discuss both the technical and methodological aspects of developing the platform. A key finding is that content must be developed in collaboration with didactics experts in order to effectively serve the project’s target groups – teachers and students of civics.
During the fall months, two new work packages will be off to a head-start. Led by the CEU, a team of historians will meet in November in Budapest in the framework of a work package analyzing the ideational-historical contexts of illiberalism. The CEU team is also in close coordination with the researchers at Oxford to lay the groundwork for a work package that brings together political philosophers to explore what normative limits liberals may need to consider when responding to the challenge of illiberalism.
The AUTHLIB consortium also continues to put emphasis on discussing its ongoing research and findings with the academic and policy community. To kick off the fall conference season, we organized a discussion at the Budapest Forum on the varieties and similarities of illiberal challengers, focusing on the cases of Austria and Czechia in the European context. On October 1, AUTHLIB members and invited guests will explore the outcome of Austria’s parliamentary elections in an online panel.
