Working papers

Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies: Information, Legacies, Temporality
(Introduction to the double special issue of Comparative Political Studies "Back from the Brink: Countering Illiberalism in Liberal Democracies", co-edited with Isabela Mares, forthcoming 2026)

The article lays the foundations of a research agenda on the conditions favoring short-term success against emerging illiberal challenges--necessary for democrats to rebuild support and strengthen democratic resilience. When confronting an illiberal executive (resistance scenario) or a rising illiberal opposition (prevention scenario), democrats face a temporal paradox: early in the confrontation, illiberals are easier to defeat, but uncertainty about the regime threat hampers coordination and mobilization. As illiberals gain influence, the treat becomes clearer, improving the chances of effective coordination, yet the range of viable countermeasures shrinks, reducing the likelihood of success. Exogenous information and favorable institutional legacies enhance democrats' ability to navigate thois paradox successfully. When an illiberal opposition is on the brink of power, democrats enter trench warfare (containment scenario), best seen as part of a longer-run sequence. The article identifies key research challenges and summarizes how the contributions in the special issue address some of them.

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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

The paper analyzes the importance of diffusion processes on the possibility of resisting backsliding successfully. Where backsliding follows prior cases, democratic oppositions can treat earlier experiences of backsliding in other countries as warnings, pushing for prompt resistance to executive reforms whose illiberal potential is still ambiguous. These "negative learning" dynamics are examined in Hungary since 2010, Poland from 2015 to 2023, and Israel after 2022. Press analysis and interviews with civil society leaders confirm the hypothesis by showing the importance of negative foreign examples as a semantic shortcut for unifying democratic opposition in Poland, and in particular in Israel, but not in Hungary. Overall, the historical sequencing of backsliding cases has the potential to reshape the dynamics of democratic erosion as oppositions learn from abroad and illiberal executives adapt their tactics accordingly. The analysis emphasizes the importance of historical time in the analysis of resistance to backsliding and complements studies focusing on the role of structural and organizational conditions of civil society for resisting 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)

Decisions about units of observation and units of analysis are central to research design. Although the methodological literature in various fields has recognized that different strategies of unit selection typically have a substantial influence on empirical findings, the guidelines offered on how to select the appropriate units for analysis are lacunose and at times unsound. In a first attempt to elaborate better guidelines, the paper argues that unit selection should be driven by the theoretical expectations about the data generating process, and translates this general advice into concrete methodological steps in three lines of scholarship in which difficult unit decisions arise. In the cases of selection of temporal units in longitudinal research and of geographical units for subnational analysis, we draw from insights from the measurement literature to devise a strategy on how to attain theory-driven unit selection. In cases where the data generating process works across units at different levels, we discuss the pitfalls of testing macro-propositions with aggregate data and illustrate the steps necessary to adapt one's empirical strategy in light of the causal process at work.

Tel: +44 (0)1865 276752; Fax: +44 (0)1865 276767; giovanni.capoccia@politics.ox.ac.uk