Democracy in Crisis – Bringing Public Discourse (Back) In

Ever since its existence, democracy is periodically diagnosed to be in crisis. When such crises are diagnosed, reference is usually made to the malfunctioning of core democratic institutions. Parties are considered to be in decline due to dwindling membership or the incapacity to recruit capable personnel for filling public offices. Citizens are seen as disenchanted by democracy, as measured by their levels of trust or their decision not to participate in political processes any longer. Common to these disparate dimensions of democratic crises is their reference to actual behavior of different actors, who, purposefully or inadvertently, undermine democracy with their (non-)action. This leaves a blank spot in the democracy crisis literature that we aim at filling with this paper. We analyze the rhetoric used by political leaders - a crucial dimension of democracy which is, however, not captured by any of the current democracy measurements. Public discourses legitimize or foster the values they transmit (Dawson 2018). If those values are of illiberal nature, the prospects of liberal democracy in that country are bleak (Linz 1978, Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). Liberal democracies can only endure if they are staffed by officials who identify with the values they enshrine (Dawson 2018, p. 8). We employ web-scraping techniques and novel text-as-data approaches to scrutinize the ‘liberalness’ in the speeches of political leaders. Our first findings of analyzing over 6000 speeches delivered by 30 heads of governments from EU member states and candidate countries (2010-2018) illustrate four different scenarios in which public discourse (1) has changed from liberal to illiberal, (2) has changed from illiberal to liberal, (3) remained liberal or (4) illiberal. Our index reflects such trends of (il)liberalness in public discourses and thereby functions as an early-warning system for democratic backsliding.