Mapping the Illiberal Challenge: Findings from the AUTHLIB project

What is the nature of contemporary illiberalism? What are its drivers and consequences? During more than three years, researchers across Europe collaborated under the Horizon Europe–funded project Neo-authoritarianism in Europe and the Liberal Democratic Response (AUTHLIB), based on the premise that liberal democracy faces not one ideological challenge but many. Jan Rovny led the Sciences Po team, which was one of the project partners.

During the final conference at Central European University in Budapest on 8–9 January 2026, AUTHLIB consortium scholars presented the project's main results. 

Measuring illiberalism at party and citizen level: results from the Sciences Po team

Caterina Froio discussed illiberal trajectories in elite and mass politics in France (joint work with Elena Cossu, Romain Lachat and Jan Rovny). To what extent, and how, is liberal democracy contested in France by political parties and citizens?

Jan Rovny, one of the principal investigators of both the AUTHLIB project and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, demonstrated how the 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey helped to capture various facets of illiberalism at the level of political parties in Eastern and Western Europe.

With Elena Cossu and Luis Sattelmayer, Jan Rovny also examined support for democracy among a minority group, namely Muslims in Western Europe. 

Elena Cossu presented her research into using large language models to measure difficult political concepts, such as illiberalism, in social media data.

Find out more about the concluding conference and watch the full series of presentations.

Elena Cossu and Caterina Froio previously published a study analysing over 140,000 tweets from French political parties. They showed that the 2015-2016 Islamist attacks in France had prompted mainstream parties to adopt harsher and more exclusionary language regarding multiculturalism and Islam, thereby narrowing the gap between the political centre and the far right (see also this blog post). This study was part of a special issue of the journal Politics and Governance, titled “Illiberal Politics in Europe", which was edited by four AUTHLIB scholars.

Interactive data visualisations

The AUTHLIB project relied on a wealth of data, combining surveys, speeches and social media analysis. The project covered seven countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom) for the period 1999–2024, and examined the levels of citizens, political parties and political leaders.

The AUTHLIB Interactive Dashboard combines datasets produced by multiple members of the AUTHLIB consortium, allowing researchers, journalists, and citizens to explore how authoritarianism, populism, and illiberalism manifest across countries and time. 

The interactive app permits users to explore:

• Countries’, political parties’ and political leaders’ scores based on ideological positions such as illiberalism, populism, nationalism, etc.
• Relationships between different ideological positions.
• A comparative overview of different countries based on ideological positions.

Find out more about the datasets or directly explore the data.

Another output of AUTHLIB is a free, online course, allowing students to understand illiberal threats and how to respond to them, building on the project's findings. The course introduces students to the idea that illiberalism is not a single ideology but a set of diverse and evolving projects operating through narratives, emotions, policies, institutional strategies, and transnational networks. The course combines theoretical approaches with empirical insights from survey research, textual and social media analysis, and deliberative experiments, and places a strong emphasis on policy-relevant responses aimed at strengthening democratic resilience.

Take the online course (free).