Working papers
Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies: Information, Legacies, Temporalities
Most literature on the current
crisis of liberal democracy focuses on the rise of illiberalism and populism as
well as on the erosion of democratic rights and institutions. Less systematic
attention has been paid to how pro-democratic actors can counter illiberalism.
Focusing on advanced liberal democracies, this paper maps the strategies that
the government, pro-democratic parties, civil society organizations, and
individual voters can adopt to counter illiberal movements in situations where
illiberal parties have reached power (resistance); where they are in opposition
but are serious contenders to attain executive power in the short term
(containment); and where they are not on the brink of power but are rising in
political influence (prevention). The discussion focuses on political
strategies designed to have effects in the short term and outlines the tradeoff
and dilemmas entailed in countering illiberalism in these three scenarios. With
the purpose of identifying priorities for future research, the last section of
the paper puts forward some tentative reflections on the broad conditions of
viability and effectiveness of anti-illiberal strategies.
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The Double discourse of the Radical Right: Theory and Evidence from Germany
(with Vicente Valentim, IE Madrid, and Tobias Widmann, Aarhus University)
How do far-right politicians
navigate the tension between appealing to a broad electorate and maintaining
credibility with their ideological base? This paper explores the “double
discourse” of far-right parties—the strategic shift in rhetoric between
public-facing (frontstage) and more private (backstage) communication. We argue
that in liberal democracies, the stigmatization of far-right views incentivizes
politicians to moderate their language in public while adopting more extreme
rhetoric in in-group settings. Focusing on the German case, we compare the
Alternative für Deutschland’s (AfD) speeches in parliament with their posts on
Telegram channels. Using a variety of computational text analysis tools, we
measure themes, emotional tone, hate speech, and rhetorical proximity to stigmatized
language. The results show that AfD politicians systematically use more radical
language in Telegram than in parliamentary speeches. These findings highlight
how far-right actors manage reputational constraints and use backstage
platforms to test and normalize previously stigmatized discourse.
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"Our Present is their Past; their Present is our Future". Diffusion and Resistance to Backsliding
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Shaping competition: Allies' party licensing and the extreme right in Germany
(with Grigore Pop-Eleches, Princeton University)
Political
elites in new democracies typically confront the problem of how to
mitigate the destabilizing potential of large masses of alienated
voters who might oppose the new regime, either because they are still
ideologically linked to the past authoritarian regime or because they
associate the democratic transition with the loss of material resources
and social prestige. The dilemmas associated with this situation are
well known: preventing the reorganization of radical
“successor parties” might increase
voters’ alienation and sow the seeds of more instability,
while allowing such organizations to compete freely might entail costs
in terms of government stability and effectiveness in the shorter term.
Attracting disaffected individuals under the banners of moderate
parties with the promise of policy concessions on their most pressing
material demands is often considered an effective strategy
in enlarging
the social bases of the new regime. Using a subnational design, the
paper explores the impact of these choices on the development of the
extreme right in West Germany during the first decade of the Federal
Republic.
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Normative Frameworks, Electoral Strategies, and the Boundaries of Pluralism in post-Fascist Democracies: The Case of Italy
Variation in the political inclusion or marginalization of the extreme right in Western European democracies is typically explained by focusing on ideational factors, in particular processes of “political learning”, and the “politics of memory” —broadly speaking, whether the public debate is dominated by the rejection of the country’s Fascist past, or whether ambiguity prevails. This paper argues that the emergence of public norms legitimizing the political marginalization of the extreme right is endogenous to whether the extreme right is illegalized in the aftermath of the democratic transition. In turn, this outcome is not driven by how key collective actors and decision-makers view the Fascist past, but by their expected short-term gains in access to governmental power and policy influence. The paper elaborates these theoretical propositions and tests them with newly collected archival and quantitative evidence on post-war Italy. The argument has implications for the analysis of the marginalization or inclusion of the extreme right in comparable cases, and for a more nuanced understanding of the role of public norms in establishing the boundaries of legitimate dissent in liberal democracies.
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Selecting Units in Political Research
(with Laura Stoker, UC Berkeley)