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.