Illiberal parties and autocratization: systemic contagion, complicit partners, enabling opponents

Recent research has demonstrated that several countries worldwide are today experiencing substantial decreases in non-electoral components of democratic quality, from rule of law and accountability to freedom and minority rights. However, we still lack a complete understanding of the role that political parties play in these processes. In particular, the literature evaluating the impact of populist parties in government has produced contradictory findings and is related to specific ideologies or contexts. However, it has also been shown how even mainstream parties can adopt more radical positions in response to the emergence of challenger actors. Still, the scope of these analyses is mainly concentrated on more or less established democracies. From a different perspective, the contributions on autocratization or de-democratization – with some relevant exceptions – rarely consider political parties at all or include them systematically in comparative analyses. This paper aims to fill this gap, taking over where previous analyses on the topic have left, with the following hypotheses. First, we will test to what extent the degree of illiberalism of an individual party (defined as the anti-pluralist or anti-democratic tendencies of its ideology) can spread in the whole party-system over time (illiberal contagion effect). Secondly, we will examine under what conditions illiberal parties are related to processes of erosion of democratic quality in their country in two ways. In detail, we expect that the effect of an illiberal party on the political regime depends not only on whether the party is in office, but also on the attitudes of other parties. In fact, being faced with more (il)liberal coalition partners or a (il)liberal opposition could (increase) decrease the detrimental effect of illiberal parties on democratic downturns. This will elucidate the importance of coalition partners or opposition parties as key, systemic actors of political resistance to autocratization (liberal anchors vs. illiberal sinkers effect). Combining data from expert surveys (V-Party, V-Dem) for a time-series cross-sectional analysis from a global sample of liberal and electoral democracies in the last decades, we will offer new insights for the literatures on illiberalism, party competition as well as on autocratization and resistance.