Post-Authoritarian Norms and the Ideological Legacy of Dictatorships

Project Information

POSTNORM

Grant agreement ID: 101088868

DOI

10.3030/101088868

EC signature date 31 March 2023

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 896 800,00

EU contribution

€ 1 896 800,00

Coordinated by

EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - POSTNORM (Post-Authoritarian Norms and the Ideological Legacy of Dictatorships)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Why had once successful left-wing parties in Poland nearly died out by 2015 (Grzymala-Busse 2019)? Why has Portugal been one of the last countries in Western Europe to see a radical right party in the national parliament? Why are right-wing individuals more likely to protest in Eastern Europe than left-wing individuals (Kostelka and Rovny 2019)?

POSTNORM proposes a theory postulating that these seemingly unrelated patterns are the product of a single process: the rejection of the ideological brand of the past authoritarian regime. Through novel survey experiments, POSTNORM will examine how, in new democracies, the ideological associations with the old regime serve as a focal point for norms that govern what the appropriate political positions for voters and parties are: in democracies following left/right-wing dictatorship, voters and political elites avoid associating themselves with the left/right, respectively.

POSTNORM further derives a set of testable expectations about how this bias shapes both the demand and the supply side of party competition. The bias colors citizens’ ideological preferences; perceptions of parties’ stances on these issues; national identity; political discussions; the supply of new parties; post-transition party names and programmatic stances; and party elite discourse. POSTNORM will deliver a parsimonious new theory that will help make sense of heterogeneity in political competition across new democracies.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In this first segment of the project, we focused on the supply side of the POSTNORM argument, studying the responses of parties and elites to the post-authoritarian stigma. We developed five separate projects in this domain.

(1) The first, which was published in Political Analysis, developed a methodology to capture party ideology in a comparative setting via Large Language Models (LLMs). This methodology will likely prove useful for other papers in the project, as it allows for estimating parties' left-right positions even when sources such as manifestos or experts are unavailable.

(2) Second, we worked on a project showing that party systems develop “asymmetrically” in post-authoritarian contexts, with the stigmatized ideological side being under-populated.

(3) Third, building on a questionnaire we constructed and circulated, we showed that parties from the stigmatized ideological half, in post-authoritarian countries, tend to “obfuscate” their traits, i.e. by deliberately choosing names that make it more difficult for voters to place them on the ideological continuum. Projects 2 and 3 are currently under review.

(4) Fourth, we are currently looking into how candidates and elites more generally place themselves and their party on the left-right continuum: our preliminary evidence shows that parties from post-LW (post-RW) autocracies place themselves more to the right (to the left) than their counterparts from mature democracies. We are currently drafting a working paper.

(5) Fifth, we are investigating parliamentary speeches from several countries (starting from Spain and Czechia), to see how often parties on the stigmatized ideological side mention the previous regime, and in which terms. Our preliminary findings from Spain suggest that right-wing and left-wing parties use very different vocabularies when discussing the Francoist regime. We are currently performing further analysis to validate our findings across several countries.

Besides the five projects just discussed, which more closely pertain to the supply-side narrative of POSTNORM, the PI and two external co-authors published another paper in the "British Journal of Political Science" (2025), looking into the role mainstream parties play in "norms erosion", when it comes to immigration. Di Leo, Dinas, and Meiske published an article in “Political Behavior” (2025) that examines the downstream effects of expressive voting in one election on electoral behavior in subsequent elections.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Let us illustrate what we believe are the key contributions of the projects that are either working papers, under review, or published.

1. Political analysis: We find that LLMs can reliably estimate political parties’ ideological positions, overcoming limitations of traditional approaches such as manifesto analyses, expert scarcity, and poll biases. LLMs offer two key advantages: real-time ideological rankings and low-cost accessibility for all researchers. Given their strong correlation with expert classifications, LLMs provide a practical tool for pilot studies and for contexts lacking up-to-date ideological data.

2. Asymmetric fragmentation: our findings show that party systems develop asymmetrically, helping explain the rise of right-wing populism in post-Communist Eastern Europe. This contributes to research on new party entry by emphasizing the often-overlooked role of ideology. The argument helps resolve puzzles such as why post-Communist status is a significant yet poorly understood predictor in models of new party emergence. We further offer a new interpretation of electoral volatility in these countries, rooted in the wedge-like ideological distribution of parties in new democracies.

3. Party names: This study contributes to three strands of literature. First, while previous work has shown that authoritarian successor parties often rebrand to mitigate associations with former regimes, we demonstrate that rebranding is a broader adaptive strategy used by all parties. Second, we extend research on post-authoritarian ideological bias by focusing on actors positioned on the stigmatized side of the ideological spectrum and examining how this bias shapes individuals' perceptions of parties. Third, we add to emerging studies on the role of stigmatization in generating ideological bias by distinguishing between two channels of ideological signaling—party manifestos and names.

4. British Journal of Political Science: The paper examines how political elites influence not just citizens’ attitudes but also their perceptions of what opinions are socially acceptable. This broadens the understanding of how elite competition shapes democratic quality. The paper also contributes to the literature on party competition by shifting attention from the electoral effects of mainstream parties’ accommodation of exclusionary agendas to how such strategies affect established social norms.

5. Political Behavior: This paper demonstrates that expressive voting, triggered by emotional events, can have lasting effects on voters’ political preferences beyond the immediate context in which such votes are cast.


Further research will be devoted to identifying other mechanisms and channels through which the post-authoritarian stigma may unfold, especially among the public opinion.