Periodic Reporting for period 1 - AUTHLIB (Neo-authoritarianisms in Europe and the liberal democratic response)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2023-12-31
To obtain a comprehensive account of the alternatives to liberal democracy that emerged across and within countries in Europe in recent years, the AUTHLIB project explores the varieties of illiberalism and their appeal. The appeal of illiberalism manifests itself through various forms: narratives, programs and policies, emotional triggers, institutional innovations, and sophisticated methods of diffusion, each of which needs to be understood and mapped through the analysis of party documents, speeches of public figures, social media communication, national and expert-surveys, laboratory experiments, and historically focused, context-sensitive analyses. Next to describing the challenges, AUTHLIB’s goals include a definition of what liberal democracies may do in their own defence and a test of pro-democratic responses in interactive settings. To this end, AUTHLIB aims to 1) produce a map of varieties of illiberalism and citizen responses, and 2) to design and test interventions to countervail the spread of authoritarianism.
The project started with the discussion and endorsement of key documents such as the Consortium Agreement, the Ethics Documents and the Data Management Plan. The next step consisted of stock-taking, literature review and the definition of the central concepts. To achieve the latter goals, WP2 has conducted a comprehensive review of the literature on illiberalism, populism, and various forms of authoritarianism. The document identified relations and overlaps between these phenomena and developed a comprehensive conceptual network. Then, within the same Work Package, we established guidelines for empirical data collection for the entire project, thereby solidifying the common theoretical and methodological framework.
After tackling some of the principal issues of concept-formation and operationalization, we turned to empirical analyses. Out of the empirical Work Packages so far done, WP6, was completed. This WP analysed the policies pursued by illiberal political actors in the seven countries of interest across a variety of areas including education and culture, foreign policy, gender, immigration and citizenship, and foreign policy. The findings of this endeavour were summarized in a comprehensive report. The individual, policy area-specific findings are presented in separate Working Papers and in the planned thematic issue of Politics and Governance.
There has been significant progress in four still ongoing other WPs (3, 4, 5 and 7). WP3 uses text as data to identify illiberal configurations of political discourse. Within this WP, a study was prepared that clarified the methodological characteristics of adequate quantitative text analyses. After the elaboration of the methodological toolbox, WP3 turned to model-specification and to the application of the methodological tools to party manifestos, identifying semantically coherent paragraphs, translating them, and labelling them according to sentiment.
WP4 produced the first draft of the questionnaire to be deployed after the European Parliament elections. The questionnaire includes a survey experiment module. In order to arrive to the right list (and format) of questions a large number of existing surveys were analysed and new questions were designed to reflect AUTHLIB’s unique interest in the varieties of illiberal attitudes.
WP5 pursued two sperate lines of inquiry. First, it launched the development of a multidimensional indicator of illiberalism based on the manual coding of 1000 Tweets issued by electorally relevant political parties. The team is elaborating a classifier model, to be used later for analysing a larger corpus of Tweets. The ultimate goal of the WP is to measure political rhetoric using both dictionaries and machine learning. Second, the ground has been prepared for the study of emotional reactions to political rhetoric in laboratory experiments.
WP7 collects and analyses transnational events and initiatives connected to European illiberal actors and maps the online organizational links among such actors. The team compiled a list of relevant actors (political parties, think-tanks, media and civil society organizations) in the seven countries of the project, identifying around hundred relevant Facebook pages per country, prepared a codebook for protest event analysis of transnational mobilisation and concluded an Italian pilot study. A separate paper was prepared on the impact of Russia on the illiberal discursive strategies in Austria and Hungary.
After tackling some of the principal issues of concept-formation and operationalization, we turned to empirical analyses. Out of the empirical Work Packages so far done, WP6, was completed. This WP analysed the policies pursued by illiberal political actors in the seven countries of interest across a variety of areas including education and culture, foreign policy, gender, immigration and citizenship, and foreign policy. The findings of this endeavour were summarized in a comprehensive report. The individual, policy area-specific findings are presented in separate Working Papers and in the planned thematic issue of Politics and Governance.
There has been significant progress in four still ongoing other WPs (3, 4, 5 and 7). WP3 uses text as data to identify illiberal configurations of political discourse. Within this WP, a study was prepared that clarified the methodological characteristics of adequate quantitative text analyses. After the elaboration of the methodological toolbox, WP3 turned to model-specification and to the application of the methodological tools to party manifestos, identifying semantically coherent paragraphs, translating them, and labelling them according to sentiment.
WP4 produced the first draft of the questionnaire to be deployed after the European Parliament elections. The questionnaire includes a survey experiment module. In order to arrive to the right list (and format) of questions a large number of existing surveys were analysed and new questions were designed to reflect AUTHLIB’s unique interest in the varieties of illiberal attitudes.
WP5 pursued two sperate lines of inquiry. First, it launched the development of a multidimensional indicator of illiberalism based on the manual coding of 1000 Tweets issued by electorally relevant political parties. The team is elaborating a classifier model, to be used later for analysing a larger corpus of Tweets. The ultimate goal of the WP is to measure political rhetoric using both dictionaries and machine learning. Second, the ground has been prepared for the study of emotional reactions to political rhetoric in laboratory experiments.
WP7 collects and analyses transnational events and initiatives connected to European illiberal actors and maps the online organizational links among such actors. The team compiled a list of relevant actors (political parties, think-tanks, media and civil society organizations) in the seven countries of the project, identifying around hundred relevant Facebook pages per country, prepared a codebook for protest event analysis of transnational mobilisation and concluded an Italian pilot study. A separate paper was prepared on the impact of Russia on the illiberal discursive strategies in Austria and Hungary.
The critical analysis of the existing literature led to novel definitions and ontological assertions concerning the concepts of authoritarianism, populism and illiberalism and to a detailed list of empirical indicators. The report on policy areas highlighted the role of institutional settings in limiting the pernicious consequences of illiberals in power and revealed that those parties that agree on the cultural rejection of liberal democratic norms have widely different social or foreign policies. AUTHLIB also achieved major progress on adjusting text analysis methods (especially word embeddings, machine learning, and large language models such as ChatGPT) to the study of ideologies.