Across the world, we observe turns towards illiberal and even authoritarian norms and forms of government. According to a recent report by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, more than half of the world’s countries have shown a net decrease in adherence to principles of liberal democracy over the past ten years, including in areas such as judicial independence, freedom of expression and assembly, and freedom of the press. These erosions have been particularly prominent in Europe, with 17 European countries – including high-performing democracies like Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, and the United Kingdom – all showing important declines. Research on this topic in political science and sociology has traditionally focused on supply-side factors, examining how institutional forces and individual actors contribute to patterns of declining pluralist values. Nevertheless, scholars have increasingly begun to recognize the importance of demand-side factors as well, i.e., that the rise of authoritarianism and illiberalism is often achieved via democratic means and enjoys widespread public support, with individuals willing to relinquish certain civic rights and protections in exchange for greater perceived physical, cultural, and economic security. As Ekiert (2023) notes, the turn to illiberalism in part occurs because, not in spite, of public opinion. Yet how demand factors operate remains poorly understood. We lack detailed insight into how public opinions about governance and society evolve and about the dialogic relationship between supply and demand in shaping public support for authoritarianism.
The project addresses this question of dialogical relations by bringing anthropological and sociolinguistic perspectives into a conversation about the emergence of authoritarian publics. Anthropological research has developed a sophisticated understanding of how political messaging shapes public opinion, creating “publics” that the messaging in turn responds to. The project investigates how research on the anthropology of publics can contribute to building a more comprehensive analysis of democratic erosion and the contemporary rise of illiberalism, focusing on how anti-pluralist discourses emerge and circulate. Specifically, the project asks:
- How does public messaging by different political actors help make particular political perspectives (e.g., illiberalism) dominant, and even dogmatic, in a given social context?
- What is the social and communicative process through which certain political views become authoritatively entextualised such that they become the “common sense” through which a given public recognizes itself?
By addressing these questions, the project will develop a new method for analysing processes of democratic backsliding. This will benefit research on the topic in anthropology, sociology, politics, and other related disciplines. It will also advance our understanding of dominant political currents in Europe and around the world, and identify entry points for initiatives that seek to promote democratic values and stem the rise of illiberalism.
