Explaining Varieties of Illiberalism within the Far-Right in Europe

What factors drive parties to embrace illiberal ideology? While an extensive literature deals with the challenges that both liberalism and democracy are facing across the globe, particularly from parties on the far-right and radicalized conservative actors, limited attention has been paid to the factors that explain the adoption of illiberal ideology within the party families and the potential heterogeneity that might exist in this regard. To address this issue, this article analyses the discourse of far-right parties in the European Parliament, building on a comprehensive dataset comprising of all speeches given between 1999 and 2019. In a first step, a text as data approach is employed to discern degrees of illiberalism within that discourse. Subsequently, the resulting scores are subjected to regression analysis, considering diverse explanatory factors that are theoretically identified to influence a party’s inclination towards illiberalism, such as regional legacies, individual party traits or contagion effects within European parliamentary groups or party families. Consequently, this article not only contributes to the understanding of a growing ideational challenge to the liberal consensus, but also systematically explores heterogeneity within the far-right, aiming to enhance our comprehension of the underlying dynamics.