In their latest study, Miklós Sebők, Áron Buzogány, Julia Fleischer, Theresa Gessler, Anna Takács, Sean M. Theriault, and Ákos Holányi examine illiberal policy framings using data from four countries.

The pervasive and growing illiberal movement is, perhaps, the greatest global challenge to liberal democracy today. Scholars argue that domestic and international crises have played an important role in perpetuating illiberalism among leaders and growing its support among their populace. In this paper, the researchers set out an agenda for the systematic study of illiberal policy frames (IPFs). In illustrating the potential of the concept and its operationalisation, they analyse how legislative politicians have used policy crises to communicate their policy ideas through IPFs.

First, they define and measure illiberal frames in four countries (Austria, Germany, Hungary and the United States) for two policy issues (migration and COVID-19) using a novel IPF codebook and state-of-the-art large language models. Second, they assess the extent to which the use of these frames is sensitive to exogenous policy crises. The findings suggest that the usage of illiberal political frames does not closely track the pertinent policy crisis metrics, such as the number of asylum seekers (for migration) or casualties (for COVID-19). Narratives show no relation to markers of the underlying policy crises, which points to a political strategy based on continued fear-mongering rather than crisis exploitation.

The full study is available here.