Mapping liberals, populists, and authoritarian parties in Europe in political space

The paper considers the stances of political parties in Europe on the question of democratic governance, in particular whether they support democracy understood as constitutional liberalism, or democracy as majoritarianism unbound of constitutional constraint, or oppose democracy in its entirety. Measurement of these aspects of parties’ position has hitherto been relatively limited, so the first contribution of the paper is to use the results of a 2019 expert survey of parties in 24 European democracies to clarify the landscape of stances on this dimension. The second contribution is then to clarify how parties’ stance on democratic governance relate to other issue dimensions, in particular to social liberalism and conservatism, where it is often presumed in the literature that illiberal perspectives have a strongly socially conservative bias. Our findings, however, point to a much more nuanced and varied set of relationships: political liberals can be socially conservative; populists can be socially liberal; and populists are often far from authoritarian. A correlate of these differences can regularly be found in the extent to which citizens and supporters of parties are socially liberal themselves.