Work Packages

The “Identifying the challenges to liberal democracy” work package defines the nature and processes of liberal democracy and the principal challenges it faces along constitutional, social, and ideological dimensions. The theoretical work aims to develop definitions and ontological claims in order to structure the literature review of the project and to theoretically inform the subsequent data-gathering stage. A further historical perspective on social, economic, and technological tendencies supports the identification of recurring and lasting challenges and the building of possible scenarios for the near future – tendencies like the pernicious social implications of artificial intelligence, the lack of accountability in transnational activities, or Anthropocene-driven threats.

The work package also assesses whether, how, and to what extent illiberal actors may be able to exploit these trends and challenges, while also taking diverse shades of both liberal democratic and neo-authoritarian ideological proposals into account.

The work package is led by Radosław Markowski, head of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the SWPS University.

The USWPS team includes: Adam Bodnar, Ben Stanley, Piotr Zagórski and Marta Żerkowska-Balas.

“Ideological configurations” is the project’s most extensive empirical data-collection module. This work package examines the ideological alternatives to liberal democracy, and their relative position in the new ideological-political space in 21^st century Europe. Both representatives and challengers of liberal democracy take a variety of stances on diverse political issues – both in terms of the positions and the salience they attach to them. Actors compete through positioning not only on long-standing issues that divide societies, but also through the introduction of new or under-emphasized topics. The process of political competition, including the contest between liberal democratic and neo-authoritarian actors, thus revolves around the construction of ideological packages produced through associations between political stances on diverse issues, novel frames, and innovative argumentative strategies.

Against that background, this work package analyzes the diverse shades of liberal democratic and neo-authoritarian ideological proposals, and it delivers an ideological map highlighting the distinctive ideological features of various forms of neo-authoritarianism as well as of liberal democratic appeals. To achieve this, the work package will conduct ideological space construction through qualitative and quantitative text analysis of elite discourse and social media analysis.

The work package is led by Jan Rovny, Associate Professor at Sciences Po, Center for European Studies and Compared Politics (CEE).

The Sciences Po CEE team includes: Jean-Philippe Cointet, Elena Cossu, Caterina Froio and Romain Lachat.

The “Survey-based data-collection and experiments” work package embeds ideological orientations into social contexts and aims at identifying the mechanisms behind the acceptance or rejection of particular authoritarian frames. The tasks set for the work package are twofold. Under the leadership of Sciences Po, the work package identifies a set of individual social characteristics associated with illiberal views by analyzing existing data. In parallel, the research conducted by SWPS University collects new survey and experimental data in order to identify different patterns of citizens’ responses to illiberal frames produced by political elites.

On the one hand, the surveys capture relevant socio-political configurations in the adult populations. On the other, the experiments allow to test the malleability of attitudes and to separate citizens’ commitment to ideological values from their attitudes to decision-making procedures and their self-identifications. Whether one supports liberal democracy depends on a host of factors that can be grouped into two major clusters: social context (bonds, interactions, social pressure) and strictly political factors (party identification, political polarization, ideological identities). Survey (conjoint) experiments expose citizens to these factors, making it possible to estimate their potential appeal.

The work package is led by Radosław Markowski, head of the Center for the Study of Democracy at the SWPS University.

The USWPS team includes: Adam Bodnar, Ben Stanley, Piotr Zagórski and Marta Żerkowska-Balas.

The work package investigates the rhetorical and emotional appeals made by illiberal parties and elites toward citizens, and their receptions by both their supporters and opponents. The research is conducted on the basis of two interlinked hypotheses. First, that illiberals’ success may be strongly related to the emotional triggers, such as anger and disgust, activated by their rhetoric. And, second, that the precise nature of the generated emotions will vary with the varieties of illiberalism in different contexts. Analyzing the emotional content of discourses is at the empirical core of the work package.

The “Illiberalism in power” work package reviews both policies and narratives developed by neo-authoritarians in power. The work package is based on the assumption that illiberal policies may have long-term consequences and may actually be designed with these long-term implications in mind. Institutional reforms, the use of the state apparatus to nurture new social elites, the development of socialization structures and geopolitical alliances, or efforts aimed at influencing the patterns of social reproduction are prominent examples. The work package records the differences between various authoritarian actors in their attitudes to vulnerable groups in the society.

The primary empirical basis of this work package is provided by decrees and laws introduced by governments or proposed by parties. The work package also analyzes the use and abuse of democratic rhetoric and practices that allows illiberals to appear as the defenders of the “real people.”

The work package is led by Zsolt Enyedi, Professor at the Department of Political Science and Senior Researcher at the Democracy Institute of the Central European University.

The CEU team includes: Elena Basheska, Éva Fodor, Michael Ignatieff, Erin K. Jenne, Dimitry Kochenov, Seraphine F. Maerz, Zoltán Miklósi, Bálint Mikola, Andres Moles, Péter Radó, Liliia Sablina, Carsten Q. Schneider, Dorottya Szikra, Balázs Trencsényi, Balázs Vedres, Franziska Wagner and Mehmet Yavuz.

The “International co-operation and diffusion” work package explores and maps the co-operation among illiberal organizations, specifically the transnationalization and diffusion of illiberal political frames, networks, and strategies. With social network analysis investigating online links between issues and actors and through conducting interviews with activists and experts, the work package explores and maps the spread of such new initiatives and their impact on the illiberal intellectual agenda. The work package also strives to identify the role played by external forces, such as Russia’s government and radicalized U.S. think tanks, both in ideational production and in providing resources for spreading ideas.

The social media analysis conducted within the work package contributes to this work package as well, as it uncovers the role of bots (highly automated accounts) in disseminating political information, which can help anti-liberal parties to overcome their financial or organizational deficiencies. This work package draws on social movement studies and research on political and movement parties to address the dynamics of internationalization, also paying special attention to the political opportunities provided by European integration.

The work package is led by Manuela Caiani, Associate Professor in Political Science at the Scuola Normale Superiore.

The SNS team includes: Karlo Kralj and Hans-Jörg Trenz.

The task of the “Historical embedding” work package is to identify the ideational-historical contexts of illiberalism. The existing programmatic, emotional, and social configurations behind the contemporary challenges to liberal democracy cannot fully be understood without situating them in their historical trajectories. While several of the illiberal ideological packages are novel, they are usually built on country-specific or regional intellectual traditions. The work package’s interdisciplinary team provides an overview of alternative, often underground, ideological developments of the 20^th and 21^st century that inform current political cleavages.

The research pursues a multi-level comparative and genealogical analysis of key ideological components of the contemporary anti-liberal wave, highlighting the contextual differences (for instance, between the two sides of the Iron Curtain) but also the transnational transfers at different points in time (such as between various sub-cultures of anti-modernist radicalism). The work package assesses whether the detected ideological configurations occurred as deliberate attempts to design a socio-political order of a certain type with clearly identifiable authors (for example, Carl Schmitt, evoked by different actors in different contexts), or instead arose as unintentional side-effects of different “axiological sentiments” dominant at a given period and in a particular place.

The work package is led by Zsolt Enyedi, Professor at the Department of Political Science and Senior Researcher at the Democracy Institute of the Central European University.

The CEU team includes: Elena Basheska, Éva Fodor, Michael Ignatieff, Erin K. Jenne, Dimitry Kochenov, Seraphine F. Maerz, Zoltán Miklósi, Bálint Mikola, Andres Moles, Péter Radó, Liliia Sablina, Carsten Q. Schneider, Dorottya Szikra, Balázs Trencsényi, Balázs Vedres, Franziska Wagner and Mehmet Yavuz.

The purpose of the “Building and validating the multi-dimensional map” work package is to integrate the results of previous work packages into a comprehensive map of the ideological challenges to liberal democracy and to generalize the findings of the case studies to the wider European context. The work package considers several questions concerning the dimensions analyzed so far: Are they aligned, such that programmatic and emotional appeals are regularly associated? If so, which kinds of programmatic appeals operate with what sort of emotions? Are the social bases of each appeal similar across settings, or do they vary systematically with the constellation? Are the legislative and legal responses consistent across constellations, or do they also vary?

And what kinds of factors at the national, party, societal, and elite levels explain the variation in the constellations that we observe? In this analytical phase, the research pays particular attention to internal and external validity. In terms of internal validity, the work package seeks to establish theoretically plausible mechanisms that link programmatic, emotional, societal, and legislative outcomes. This process relies on various data-reduction techniques, such as principal component analysis, and item response theory. In terms of external validity, the work package tests the relationships identified in the map with a most similar/most different setting.

The work package is led by Zsolt Enyedi, Professor at the Department of Political Science and Senior Researcher at the Democracy Institute of the Central European University.

The CEU team includes: Elena Basheska, Éva Fodor, Michael Ignatieff, Erin K. Jenne, Dimitry Kochenov, Seraphine F. Maerz, Zoltán Miklósi, Bálint Mikola, Andres Moles, Péter Radó, Liliia Sablina, Carsten Q. Schneider, Dorottya Szikra, Balázs Trencsényi, Balázs Vedres, Franziska Wagner and Mehmet Yavuz.

The “Normative limits of interventions” work package considers both the conceptual meaning of illiberalism and the normative limits that liberals should impose on themselves in responding to illiberal challenges. Having identified the emotional appeals and the normative limits of liberal responses, the work package designs and conducts experiments that seek to understand how illiberal messages may be effectively and legitimately countered. The work package therefore assists the central goal of the project by designing a toolkit of effective and defensible actions that policymakers might adopt in defense of liberal democracy.

Based on project inputs such as ideological arguments, narratives, and various forms of appeal, the “Mini-publics” work package develops targeted interventions in the form of deliberative forums – the Ideological Opponents’ Forum, the Professionals of Democracy Forum, and the Citizen Forum. Through these diverse fora the work package develops and tests novel educational toolkits used in creating an e-learning platform. The Ideological Opponents’ Forum and the Citizen Forum are organized at national level and are utilized to provide information on how ideological values, or the lack of such values, shape deliberation about problems that require practical solutions.

The Professionals of Democracy Forum is transnational and is used to shape the instruments for the other two fora in the input and output phases, shape policy recommendations, and act as a multiplicator in their dissemination.

The work package is led by Petra Guasti, Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Charles University.

The Charles University team includes: Jaroslav Bilek, Tomas Cirhan and Michel Perottino.