Anti-Democratic Discourse: Meaning and Measurement

This Paper examines a specific form of incivil politics: discourse that undermines democracy. It argues that antidemocratic discourse—discourse that undermines or attacks values and institutions of liberal democracy—is a form of uncivil discourse that deserves particular attention from social scientists. In an age of democratic deconsolidation, political strategies, often employed by parties of the populist radical right, that attack values such as pluralism, the rule of law or the legitimacy of political opposition may play a role in the erosion of support for democracy, or the erosion of democratic institutions and practices. Traditional institutional approaches to the comparative measurement of democracy and democratic backsliding do not typically include such discursive dimensions of democracy. We make a case for defining and measuring the discursive dimension of democracy. With comparative empirical data on democratic discourse, social scientists will be able to investigate relationships between discursive shifts and institutional reform, as well as shifts in mass values. The paper sets two main tasks: conceptual development and operationalization of antidemocratic discourse. The Paper first defines and develops the concept of ‘anti-democratic discourse’, distinguishing it from the broader concept of political incivility. In doing this, the Paper will review the wide-ranging literature on political incivility in order to identify common ground, synthesizing this with literature on definitions of democracy. Second, it discusses the difficult issues of operationalization and measurement of anti-democratic discourse. It seeks to identify strategies from the measurement on uncivil discourse that can be applied to measuring undemocratic discourse by government and political parties.